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Photographs,
along with theatre schema, books, trompe l'oeil
paintings, and maps have served as memory technologies
that draw on visual and spatial systems. These
technologies function as repositories for memory, a place
where the past is deposited and later retrieved. If as
Ada Lovelace envisaged, the computer is in essence a
memory technology, multimedia as an imprint of zeros and
ones with spatial dimensions is ideally suited to the
portrayal of the fluid and multi-layered constructions of
the past. Indeed, recent multimedia works have repeatedly
used critical practice to rework theoretical debates
about memory. Currently, we
are at a preliminary stage of conceptualising the
computer screen as an exploratory space with
aesthetic dimensions. I would argue that a more focused
grasp of the aesthetic dimensions of computer screen
space is a vital component in understanding contemporary
new media practice. This paper attempts to open up this
discussion by exploring debates about technologies of
memory and illustrating these issues through reference to
a section of my own digital media work:
Meander. Meander
is a multimedia work in progress[1]
that draws strategies from both the autobiographical and
documentary areas of media practice to establish a
conversation between actuality (domestic photographs, 8mm
home movies) and the personal (recalled memories). These
aspects are foregrounded in relation to feminist
discourses about memory and subjectivity and digitally
constructed into memory scenes. In these scenes, I
attempt to integrate ideas about photography as a medium
of memory into the techniques of collage as a strategy
for the visualisation of a subjectively positioned past.
In so doing, I contest ideas about digital media as mere
surface spectacle and facile pastiche and instead argue
that new media enable a productive interplay between
conceptual ideas and visualising techniques in the
spatial dimension. In using my
own work, the paper investigates how questions about
re-constructing the past might be articulated through
multimedia design - specifically conceptual design and
screen imaging. The key questions I am exploring are:
what is the act of memory; how have photographs
functioned as domestic media of memory, and how might
these ideas be incorporated into a multimedia screen
design? In answering these questions, I attempt to
theorise how domestic photography and film function as
media of memory within a particular form of media arts
practice. In a series of
memoirs written in 1939, Virginia Woolf recalls her first
memories: the colours of her mother's dress close up on a
journey; hearing the waves breaking; the blind being
drawn at St. Ives and feeling "the purest ecstasy I can
conceive" [2].
For Woolf, the past was divided into moments of being and
non-being. Moments of being were life lived consciously
as rapture, compared to non-being, the cotton wool
everyday type of existence. These descriptions of
heightened experience relate to what James Joyce would
have called an "epiphany". The most famous literary
example of this accelerated moment of recollection must
be Marcel Proust's ecstatic moment in A la
recherché du temps perdu, where a flood of
involuntary childhood memories are activated upon eating
a Madeleine. These recollections understood as "a token
of some real thing behind appearances" (Woolf,84),
suggest involuntary memory as a key to an unproblematic
version of the past. This notion of memory as a direct
link to an essential truth echoes the Greek understanding
of mnemonics as a conduit to transcendental
knowledge. For the
Greeks, memory was mnaomai - to mention something
or somebody. The Greeks devised mnemotechnics as a
strategy of recall where information would be visually
mapped onto a real or imagined space. In The art of
memory, Frances Yates describes how students of
rhetoric would mentally map the elements of the speech
onto the geographic space of a building in order to
memorise it. In re-constructing the speech they
visualised walking through the imagined building,
accessing the room structures and their associated
elements of knowledge. During the Renaissance there were
hopes that this memory system with its emphasis on
cognitive knowledge and the occult would become a
universal language based on spatial, visual systems.
Thus, within the rules of the mnemotechne, space both
real and imaginary was perceived as a technology of
memory. Amongst the
most important Renaissance practitioners of this form of
the art of memory were Giulio Camillo and Giordano Bruno.
For them this technology of memory was seen as the key to
essential truths and transcendent knowledge. Giordano
Bruno devised memory images out of a history of human
observation, shapes, forms and colour and the rotation of
heavenly bodies. Giulio Camillo built what he called a
memory theatre, an amphitheater where all the memory of
the world was inscribed through a variety of little
boxes, niches, images, figures and ornaments. In this
memory theatre, iconic artefacts located within the
architectural landscape set up an indexical relation
between the object and its mnemonic element. As a system
of recall, these memory systems start to look very
contemporary in light of computer technologies and
particularly multimedia with its reliance on visual
systems, spatial analogies and trompe l'oeil style
representation. Simon Sharma
in Landscape and Memory has another take on
memory, memory as a projection onto the places and sites
of the landscape. He argues that the garden of
Western landscape has been conceptualised as a view
framed through the cultural habits of humanity. Through
these frames, geographical locales have become overlaid
with mythology and the human imagination to become
embodied memory. One example he provides is the mediation
between geography, invention and culture in the German
woods of the late 18th and early 19th century. In this
mediation the woods are represented as Druid groves,
woodland idylls and sylvan Arcadias to create an idea of
a utopian primitivism directly link to a notion of the
German character. Pierre Nora,
also conceives of memory as a site or place, as a
Lieux de memoire. In Realms of Memory, he
argues that Lieux de memoire have arisen as a
replacement for the lived experience of memory within a
community, the milieu de memoire. For Nora, modern
memory is first of all archival. "It relies entirely on
the specificity of the trace, the materiality of the
vestige, the concreteness of the recording, the
visibility of the image"[3].
He argues that the less memory is experienced from
within, the more we rely on external props, in particular
the archive and documents of authentication. Nora goes on
to say that in the process of not knowing what might be
precious in the future, we have lost the art of
selectively forgetting, resulting in the increasing
burden of mass accumulation of evidence of the
past. In collecting
evidence of the past, the computer has become the primary
vehicle for storage and retrieval. If the computer then
houses the memory theatre, what are the forms of imaging
and how do we conceive of the past when multimedia (as
the computer's specific memory technology) allows for and
expects an active interplay between user and
screen? Within media
arts, the computer screen offers us a digital mise-en-
scène, which references theatre, pictorial
traditions and cinematic conventions. Over the last
decade, multimedia has emerged as a key device for
manipulating these media conventions.My own work
Meander draws on the digital techniques of
compositing and multilayering to construct scenes as a
way of marking the past. Using photographs as the point
of departure, it contrasts divergent family narratives
through audio-visual re-constructions of recalled moments
from the past. Memory fragments in the form of visual
tableaus are animated though archival 8mm film, family
photographs, soundscapes and recently filmed landscapes
and objects. These tableaux seek to articulate moments of
epiphany - moments of recollection and revelation that
have become embedded in the memory against the background
of family fictions. The past
buried in the imagination and refracted through the
families media of memory, (photographs and home-movies)
is evoked through the archaeological investigations of
the author as adult. Viewed from a distance, the domestic
and everyday starts to look like the spectacular other -
the exotic, aligned to an anthropological study within
which there is no fully 'outside' position. In the
process of observing the past, issues of family
dysfunction, the split between the experiential self, the
familial other self and the child remembered self are
bought into sharp focus. In illuminating the past as
personal ethnography[4],
Meander plays with identity positions, questions
of power relations and re-arranges family hierarchies. In
it authorial subjectivity is on display and held up to
scrutiny through the navigable pathways through familial
mythologies of memory. Meander
draws on personal ethnography to navigate the territory
of memory through the media of authentication
(photographs and 8mm home movies) and personal
remembering. Whilst archival footage and the documentary
interview hold a privileged position in relation to
notions of the truth and claims to the real, Meander
explores the construction of memory as leaky. By
taking photographic albums as a tool of aide
memoire, divergent modes of recall and multiple
subject positions are taken up by the family. In these
positions and resulting filmed narratives, the archival
photographs both construct an absence - by referring to
that which is no longer present - and construct a
mythology of the author's own subjectivity based on
fragments of memory. The author's
own childhood memory fragments mix the found and the
fictional to form audio-visual scenes as sites of
exploration. These scenes are constructed through sense
memory: words; smells; sounds; visions. Rooms in an
Edwardian house in Northern England; old photographic
slides in a hand-held projector; eating liquorice on the
back seat of the car; a nanny sitting on her hair in a
red room; Mr. Snow played on a piano; the texture
of fur against skin; the sounds of the garden in the
early morning. When the image
from the camera obscura was first fixed onto a
pewter plate in the 1820s the process was seen as both
scientific and magical. In its association with
positivism [6],
the camera was established as a direct recorder of
observable facts and reality - a scientific instrument
for recording an impersonal and objective neutrality.
Simultaneously, the chemical process of fixing the sun's
rays was seen as alchemic and magical. For Fox Talbot,
the inventor of an improvedf version of the photogenic
drawing, the Calotype, photography was an aid to memory,
a means of easing the burden of ever-accumulating
information and sense impressions. For Talbot,
photography, as an attempt to retain the past, was the
new technology of memory for drawing nature, 'the pencil
of nature'.[7] In Camera
lucida, Raymond Barthes argues that the legitimate
antecedents of photography were chemical transformations
rather than the camera obscura and perspective. It
is indeed easy to imagine that the process of an image
appearing and being made permanent would have held a
fascination at least equal to that described on viewing
the Lumiére brothers' film: The arrival of a
train at La Ciotat station some sixty years later.
Photography thus conceived by Barthes as an "emanation of
past reality: a magic, not an art"[8]
takes its place within a history of 19th century
spectacle and illusionism along with the diorama, magic
lantern and phantasmagoria. These devices draw attention
to temporality, to the space between the still images,
the interrupted sequence of a new slide or a change of
lighting. The focus rests with the creation of a
spectacular mise-en-scène based on curiosity and
fascination, rather than with the perspectival illusions
of the new optical devices. Over the next
forty years, the emerging phenomenon of photography took
another twist into domestic consumption through the
family portrait and the carte de visite. These
visual wonders allowed a personal image to be preserved
and carried around for the first time. Becoming the rage
by the 1860s, the carte de visite or carte
portraits were sent to friends and collected in
albums. By 1888 Kodak set up the family as amateur
photographer by introducing the box camera with
pre-loaded and roll film. Since then the family
photograph as domestic snapshot, as captured magic
moment, has become intrinsically bound up with memory
production, domestic pleasures and family
viewing. Click
on the image to see a larger version Slide of
the house and garden, 1963. Through the
development of the snapshot, the family's past becomes
framed for the future through the dominant discourse of
family relations as safe and enduring. For my father
returning from a war that he refused to speak about,
photographs erased the past, monumentalised and
stabilised the family for the future. "I was just taking
pictures thinking this would be good to look back on in
later years when I'm old and grey and the children are
grown up and we can look back and say these were happy
days" [9].
Family photographs chronicle the passage of time, signify
rites of passage (christening, communion, and first day
at school, birthdays etc) and construct middle class
narratives of status and success. This process takes
place primarily in four stages: the construction of the
family through the devices of lens; framing and
composition at the time of taking the image; the
organisation of the photographs into a context for
viewing; and finally the re-working of the images and act
of reviewing in the present. In producing, organizing and
re-looking at the images of the past, the photograph as a
medium of memory is subject to multiple meanings,
specific fantasies, subject to present situations and the
acts of remembering and forgetting. As Annette Kuhn says
"the past is made in the present"[10
]
and the past becomes a contested zone with each reviewing
and family narration. For my family
the photograph albums have been the battleground for
control of a family narrative. First my father's
chronological organisation of "happy moments" with white
pen identification of place, location and name in leather
bound albums. Then my mother, who in the early stages of
Alzheimer's disease cropped each photograph to simulate
photo corners and arranged them without accompanying
words or linear chronology. More recently, my own
retrieval and removal of photographs from the album, some
still with the glue residue and torn backing paper into a
Tesco's plastic bag. The removal from the album forms the
preparatory stage for another construction through
photomontages and animation. What are the meanings of
these different editing processes? Was my father's aim to
make the snapshot a point of stability in turbulence? My
mother's to make sense of her past and tell her story as
a person losing her memory? Mine to construct a context
that I can inhabit? The
construction of a photo album offers a fractional story
with different narrators, many authors and based on the
expectation of future generations of readers. It is
structured from a series of past unrelated moments,
stories and anecdotes into a fragmented narrative. Such
narratives function like hypermedia texts with
disjunctions, leaps from one event to another, dead ends
and little sense of closure. Within the book of the
family, what is left out often becomes more significant
than what is immediately visible - the excluded
photographs, the traces of the on-going narrative outside
the moment captured and the off-screen visuals beyond the
edge of the frame. For in looking at the albums there is
the shock of non-recognition, the contradiction between
the memory and the image. The photographs become, as
Barthes has pointed out, "both a pseudo-presence and a
token of absence"[11].
The photograph ultimately points to loss rather than
reminding us of presence. It "does not necessarily say
what is no longer, but only and for certain what has
been" (85). This "certificate of presence", the
authenticated image provides a code, a direct encounter
with the maker of the image in direct opposition to the
experience of involuntary memory. Various
cultures have taboos against this certificate of
presence; either at the point of the photograph being
taken or in viewing the photograph after the subject has
died. For even at the time of its inception, the
photograph, as an image from the past anticipates death.
In so doing, it can effectively function as the opposite
of memory as an erasure of memory. As Barthes argues:
"not only is the photograph never, in essence, a
memory...but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a
counter memory"(91). My sister recounts how photographic
media have become her memory: "If I didn't have
photographs, I don't know what I'd remember. My memories
are cinefilm and photographs. They've gone into my
mind." As simulacra
of memory, family photographs with their albums and
mantelpiece frames claim the space of history. The past
becomes reflected within domestic photography as the
holder of memory. My father, the director of the family's
photographic archive describes the photographs as memory:
"I wanted to preserve the memories because the memories
fade quickly and it's nice to have them on record". The
photographs form the lieux de memoire of the
family, enshrined within ideas of leisure and the
artefacts of middle class consumerism: the house, the
caravan, the beach holiday and the motor car. My attempt has
been to set up questions of memory, to situate
photographs as material for interpretation and evidence -
to concur or disprove personal reminiscences. For what is
remembered of the self when the observed is there as
masked performance? In the face of the shock, the
discord, we can't recall looking like that, being in that
place, but the photo shows we were there, Barthes
"That has been"(77). Photographic images function
as a trace, as a code or clue to a meaning that is
located elsewhere "like a riddle read and
decoded"(Kuhn,18). The process involves a search for a
self that has been erased through the photograph and more
emphatically through the construction of the album. It is
an attempt to reconstitute an absent self in defense of
what is invisible, what has been hidden by the masked
performance. My father's
album image: Manchester,
1969 Cindy Sherman,
like Jo Spence, sets herself up as the subject performing
within the frame. Sherman's work draws on the fictions of
cinema to explore and reverse Laura Mulvey's notion of
the gaze. In working with the codified styles of 'B'
movies and late '50s and '60s film noir, the
femme fatale image becomes the body posing as
subject for itself. Apparently exposed for the male gaze,
Sherman's self-portraits invoke the syndromes of
exhibitionism and voyeurism whilst simultaneously
constructing their own image as speaking voice. By
scrutinising subjectivity itself and reversing the tropes
of cinematic female positioning the body is invested with
autonomy. Both Sherman and Spence counter photography as
bodily intrusion by turning it into a mirror-mask to
reflect back conventional bodily gestures of the female
subject and expose dominant visual conventions of
photographic stills. This
reflection and exaggeration of photographic visual
conventions is a key element in underscoring the
recorder/subject dichotomy inherent in the family
snapshot. In moving the image past its domestic site and
to draw attention to the subjective, Meander
further develops the idea of the mirror-mask through
an interplay between the self as imaged in the original
photograph, the 'tangible object' and the re-worked
scene. These forms of representation take place within a
history of collage with the photograph looking back to
its status as a physical object and forward to its
position as the photo-graphic. Photographs as
physical objects offer a slice of the frozen past. As
objects of memory they can be kept, re-framed, organized
and developed into a series of narratives through the
photo album, the slide show with voice over narration, or
made sacred within the shrine on the mantelpiece or the
piano. As analogue objects they are effected by time -
they can rip, yellow, be lost, torn and eventually thrown
out. Our understanding of photographs is shaped through
their impermanence, their placement and location within
the domestic setting. How do these meanings change when
they become part of digital media? I would argue
that the surfeit of digital images and the speed at which
we receive them increases the potency of the paper-based
photograph as an icon of nostalgia. The original
photograph can be scanned, digitally simulated, viewed on
screen, sent as an email attachment or uploaded into a
family web site. In so doing, it becomes screen based, a
digital trace of zeros and ones. As a less fragile memory
trace of its analogue image, it is highly suited for the
archive, but less precious as a link to the past losing
some of its original symbolic or mythological power. As
Nora notes "the trace negates the sacred but retains its
aura"(Nora,9). In retaining its aura, the digital media
refers back to the original photograph which itself is a
reflection of the original moment captured. This dilution
of the past initiates a rupture of the narrative of cozy
domesticity from which it came. Extending this
rupture, the photographic trace in digital form reworks
the privileged text through the process of montage.
Readily available tools on the desktop computer enable
multiple perspectives, reorganizations and
interpretations simultaneously. William Mitchell, in his
analysis of post-photographic forms of representation
calls this process electrobricolage. The ability
to endlessly manipulate, layer, re-size and colourise the
scanned photograph poses a disruption of the integrity or
authenticity of the photograph. Two uses of this
technique that spring to mind are the collages of Hannah
Hock and Tracey Moffatt. As a Dadaist in a pre-computer
era, Hock used disruptive montages of dominant iconic
representations. In re-working the controlling narratives
of popular culture, Hock worked with the cut up,
juxtaposition, multi-layering and text to make
ideological statements of resistance. Moffatt's
large-scale cibachromes in the Something more
series also employ collage to offer a critique of unified
anthropological constructions of culture and gender. In
these, characters as isolated spheres are imposed into
the landscape with an eerie spatiality. The cut and paste
look and multi-layering techniques evoke the messiness of
memories - intense moments of recollection set against a
background of emptiness. This translation of memory
traces and atmospheres into scenes operates in ways that
suggest childhood memories as described by Woolf. "Many
bright colours; many distinct sounds; some human beings,
caricatures; comic; several violent moments of being,
always including a circle of the scene which they cut
out: and all surrounded by a vast space" (Woolf,
92). Through the
digital apparatus of the computer and its multimedia
software new forms of digital visualisation emerge that
extend far beyond the visible realms available to camera
lens technologies. The creations of multimedia screens
are thus more closely aligned to the chemical
transformations of photography rather than any lens based
apparatus, magic rather than scientific observation or
the purely documentary. In Meander, these
curiosities are used to resurrect personal recollection
from the purely testimonial "That has been" to produce a
tableau of multiple subjectivities. In making the scenes,
I piece together formerly disconnected pieces of material
from the family albums,8 mm home movies footage, with
graphic re-constructions, soundscapes recorded at the
location and recent video interviews. In the
reconstructions, I place myself in the foreground and
create another story in the background unsettling any
unified family narrative. The composition draws on
traditional genres of photography - the single portrait,
the group shot, and holiday photographs. These are set
within the extended landscape of such tropes as the beach
scene, the perfect summer's day, the first day at school,
the first communion. The primary
site for these collective nostalgias becomes the home as
often the main acquisition of the family and the location
of family interactions and togetherness. In and out of
it, the architectural fabric, the surrounding garden, the
rooms and objects become overlaid with symbolic
association. The house functions as a type of cabinet of
curiosities, with its collection of objects, souvenirs
from another world and recalled artefacts of
childhood. Click
on the image to see a larger version In the
interviews, family members are asked to describe their
memories on seeing the photographs and to consider the
construction of their own recollection in relation to the
photographic images. The family's responses shot on video
use the talking head technique of documentary and form a
moving element of the composited screen tableau. The
family reflects on memories after looking at photographs
from the past, offering divergent narratives constructing
what might be called mythologies of
remembering. My father, as
the photographer of the family, used the garden as a
primary site for embodying memory within a type of
English middle class romantic landscape. In the
interviews my father talks about the landscape of the
garden identifying species: sycamore, laburnum,
hollyhock, red roses, ivy, mint that went wild,
rhododendron, green lawn, and the beech hedge. In the
original photographs of the garden shot by my father,
these plants along with the children as the less wild
creatures form part of the tamed, domesticated outdoors
separated from nature beyond the gate. In the
reconstructions I put myself back in the picture as both
the portrait mask self and as author of the reconstructed
tableau in order to de-stabilise memory as a singular
transparent truth and to question how photographs have
functioned as domestic technologies of memory. Video
sequences form a distinctive component of the
Meander scenes. They are used to represent the
images that replay and take precedence in the memory -
journeying to the beach, lying in the grass, listening to
my father playing the piano. These insistent memories are
composited in After effects by animating elements
of the photograph with recently shot video footage. They
play as short moving video loops against the still
photomontage backgrounds in a tradition that returns us
to the pre-cinematic linear forms of the Kinetescope and
other looped 19th century illusionist devices. This
context locates the visual images of the past as medium
of memory, not as authenticating documents but as images
of magic, spectacle and the imagination. Objects as
artefacts - the commonplace objects recalled, but no
longer in the photograph - are re-inserted into the
mise-en- scène. These take on a particular
significance as repeating involuntary memories; more
important perhaps because they don't feature in the
original photographs - the bubble bottomed glass on a
lace tablecloth, a picture of Christ, a particular beach
towel, the texture of a fur coat. This strategy draws on
Barthes' idea of punctum - the small marks that
paradoxically fill the whole picture - a refraction of
Joyce's notion of epiphany in visual form. For the user
navigating the multimedia landscape, moments of
realisation are archaeological findings, used for
investigating, re-interpreting and constructing a story.
In a process akin to digging and shifting through an
archaeological site with a teaspoon, these missing
objects of significance become clues to missing elements
of a fragmented narrative. Techniques
from the documentary or ethnographic film - forms of
legitimating evidence, such as original photographs, oral
reminiscences, film footage and interviews - collide with
the collage techniques. On screen, the physical existence
of the photograph on the top layer is emphasised, coding
it as tangible object and lending it the status of
familial memory against the visual depth of the
composited scenes. Through this strategy, the rhetorical
and aesthetic tension between ideas of real memory and
their referents in the family archive - the medium of
memory are never fully resolved. Indeed are set out as
points of tension or collision within the work. This
illustrates the cross over between documentary's link
to actuality and the relationship of pictorial
convention to the subjective and imaginary. Click
on the image to see a larger version Garden
collage as memory sequence The collages
deliberately reveal the process of recombination and
juxtaposition, the joins, oddities of scale and lack of
perspective between objects. In the collages ("collage"
is from the FrenchColler - to stack) images are
stacked in layers, overlapped and combined with
techniques from pictorial illusionism. This exaggerates
the disjunction between the flat plane of the original
photograph against the two dimensional picture space -
the foreground and background planes of the composited
scenes. In using pictorial conventions and techniques
that refer back to the screen language of bricolage,
photography and the home movie, Meander reveals
the continuously variable relationship between the
original and the re-worked images, the historical and the
subjective. As a navigable
space the user enters a negotiation with the souvenirs of
the past. Movement in screen spaces is translated into
hyper-leaps between one scene and the next through the
motifs of doors, objects, passageways, windows and the
photographs themselves. The architectural spaces of
memory are navigated by selecting narrative fragments or
locations to track. The user can follow a pathway based
on a perception of recall or construct hyper-linked
connections between photographs by arranging their own
album. Meander effectively translates the family
memory into the spatial domain through the stacking of
planes of memory; the collages of family narratives and
constructed scenes of recall. In so doing, Meander
becomes a space of memory recalling the artefacts, icons
and figures of the memory theatre. This traversing
exceeds the bounds of the merely self-reflexive through
the universality of the domestic elements - the spaces of
a middle class English childhood - the house, the school,
the garden and the church. In it the user is engaged in a
process of exploration about the ways that photography
functions as a medium of memory providing a new
understanding of relationships between self identity and
the process of familial memory creation. If the early
hope for photography was to fix the reflections of the
mirror, it is a distorting, clouded mirror that brings
along with it dreams, perceptions, fantasies. Rather than
being a precision instrument, it is one that disrupts and
disturbs recollection as much as it embodies or makes the
past. In the act of remembering, mnaomai, of
mentioning something or somebody, photography as a memory
media proclaims absence as much as presence, illusion as
much as truth. As analog
photographs erode as icons of family history and own
memories diminish, we rely more on our technologies of
memory. Meander as an autobiographical technology
of memory starts out with a sense of loss, to seek
nostalgically for traces of memory in family photographs.
At the heart of these photographs is ultimately absence,
absence of the past, absence of a singular autobiography
or unified family story. This final absence speaks about
the limitation of the family photograph as a
medium of memory, its failure to restore what has gone -
the past. In response to this absence, Meander
appropriates the genres of family photography in
order to expose their fiction and how these fictions
create audience memory. The intent is to dismantle the
family album in order to reconstruct the memoirs into
'moments of being' through the media of photographs, home
movies and family recollections. These memory fragments,
re-incorporated into a tableau restore the scene as a
space of the past. What is created in the place of a tidy
testimonial are the rituals of memory and the
construction of a personal mythology. In so doing,
another memory space is established - one that is
deliberately reflective and self-conscious about its
process. Like the
memory theatre of Giulio Camillo Delmino, described in
Francis Yates' Art of memory, the user can
navigate the landscape of memory embedded with riddles
and clues. In the process, the interplay between
imagination, memory and the autobiographical is mapped
into the path of user navigation. In this way, the user
is engaged in a process of memory creation and a debate
about ways that photography functions as a medium of
memory and the work itself becomes a memory
space. Roland
Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Flamingo,
1984). Jane M.
Gaines, and Michael Renov, eds. Collecting visible
evidence, Visible evidence, Volume 6 (Minneapolis.
University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Martin Lister,
ed. The photographic image in digital culture
(London and New York: Routledge, 1995). Peter
Lunenfeld, ed. The Digital Dialectic, New essays on
new media (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press,
1999). William J.
Mitchell, The reconfigured eye, visual truth in the
post-photographic era (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press,
1992). Pierre Nora,
Realms of memory, the construction of the french
past (Columbia University Press: New York,
1996). Simon Schama,
Landscape and memory (UK: Harper Collins,
1995). Susan Sontag,
On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1977). Jo Spence, and
Patricia Holland, eds. Family snaps: the meaning of
domestic photography (London: Virago,
1991). Jo Spence.
Putting myself in the picture, a political, personal
and photographic autobiography (London: Camden Press,
1986). Virginia
Woolfe, Moments of being. (Herts, England:
Panther, 1976). Francis Yates,
The art of memory (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1966). (To
return to your place in the text, simply click on the
endnote number) [1]
Meander is at the conceptual design stage with
some indicative visual media and prototype
design. [2]
Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past" in Moments of
being. (Herts, England: Panther, 1976),75. Further
references to this text appear as page numbers in
brackets. [3]
Pierre Nora, Realms of memory, the Construction of the
French past. (Columbia University Press: New York,
1996), 8. [4]
Personal ethnography is Michael Renov's term for a
particular sub genre category of documentary. [5]Helmut
and Alison Gernsheim, A concise history of
photography. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), back
cover. [6]
John Berger makes the point that positivism and the
camera developed in parrallel. Auguste Comte was writing
Cours de philosophie positive at the same time of
the development of the camera. [7]
The pencil of nature is the name Fox Talbot used
for the first photographically illustrated book published
in 1844. [8]Roland
Barthes, Camera lucida. (London: Flamingo, 1984),
88. Further references to this text appear as page
numbers in brackets. [9]
Video interviews with family members by the author,
1997 [10]
Annette Kuhn, '"Remembrance" in Family snaps: the meaning
of domestic photography'in Family snaps: the meaning
of domestic photography, eds. Jo Spence and Patricia
Holland (London: Virago, 1991), 22 [11]
Susan Sontag, On Photography. (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1977), 16 [12]
Jo Spence, "Soap, Family album work...and hope" in
Family snaps: the meaning of domestic photography,
eds. Jo Spence and Patricia Holland. (London: Virago,
1991), 207
6,209 words
Abstract
Introduction
Acts of
memory
Whatever
the reason may be, I find that scene making is my
natural way of marking the past. Always a scene has
arranged itself: representative,
enduring(Woolf,142).
Media
arts.
A
long cherished dream of humanity was the power to fix
the reflections of the mirror and make pictures
without the aid of the artist's pencil
[5]
These
single moments captured by the click of the shutter
remain isolated. As separate moments they have no center,
they occupy empty space. They require a narrative to
re-construct them. As Susan Sontag argues; "only that
which narrates can make us understand"(Sontag, 23). Since
the 19th century, the primary vehicle for constructing
these freestanding particles into narratives or stories
of collective family memory has been the family album.
The process of editing images into icons undertaken
through the ordering, composition and accompanying text
of the family album constitutes a story of domestic lives
from which images of conflicts, difficulties and labor
are erased. During it, images undergo inclusion,
exclusion and various framings. What types of narrative
are constructed through this process?
Jo
Spence has taken up this theme of masked performance in a
series of phototherapy works inquiring into positions of
subjectivity behind the photo album. With Rosy Martin she
explores the mother-daughter dyad in self as
mother, self as cleaning woman, late
mother. Other examples draw on photo documentary
techniques in order to mimic the tropes of the domestic
and studio portraiture, such as, self as Hollywood
virgin bride. The documentary images of self as
medical victim in the drama of infantilization
explore "where fact and fiction, past, present and
future intermingle in the timelessness of dreams and
memories"[12].
Electrobricolage
Morphology of
memory
The
house of many windows functions as the main menu offering
navigable pathways through the family's deviating forms
of recall and constructions of the past across the key
sites of house interior, the church, the school, the
beach holiday, and the garden. An Edwardian house leads
the way to scenes in the kitchen, the bedroom, the attic
and the playroom where we hear the contesting stories of
the brother, the sister, the father and the nanny. My
brother describes his memories of "different levels,
different things happened on different levels, great fun,
great home". My sister recalls "which room is which. . .
. the furniture, decorations, things that went on in
various rooms", whilst my father recalls his areas of
responsibilities, the car, the fencing, the lawn. The
nanny recalls the house: "quite awe inspiring, huge,
suddenly appeared at the end of this drive, quite
magnificent. I remember seeing it for the first time
walking up to the front door - beautiful yellow bricks,
that was lovely, then going inside". These differences
point to the varied power relations within the family and
the way that personal memory is used to reinforce or
contest these positions.
Conclusion -
Meander as memory space.
Selected
bibliography
Endnotes
