Records

In 1989 Pierre Nora wrote an article called Memory and History: les Lieux de Mémoire in which he talks about recorded history in a binary opposition to memory, where the more we archive, record, and write down, the less we have to remember. This remembrance, Nora claims, is a collective memory directly linked with who you are—place, traditions, family, etc. Although I disagree with a lot of Nora’s argument which is in the vein of an old man yelling MTV, he brings up an important question of what is recorded and what should be recorded. Twenty years after Nora’s article, our quest to archive has been amped up exponentially with the advent of digital technology. The ease of recording anything is profound, every genre of life having a recording device attached to it. However, I believe a larger aspect of this is the modern time compression, where the world space is shrunk and in order to get through all the information one has to move quickly and keep on moving. We do not know what is important to record and what isn’t because there is not enough time to contextualize. Or perhaps there is too much space to contextualize it, as we are all living on the world scale now. My sound project is wrapped up in the idea of what is important to record, and the recording devices themselves. Each moment in time has become important. Each moment in time is also different for every person, so we have bllions of recordable instances at any one instance. So what do we keep? What do we excise? Are the words “Thank you” more important to record than someone saying, “I’ll see you tonight”? Is anything more important than anything else if we can record it all, then manipulate it later?

Culture jammers and the pawns computers make us

The Yes Men are hackers, culture jammers, both isolated and interconnected more than most. This is a strange dichotomy. Hackers and culture jammers cannot belong to a group, outside of the general ethereality of being called a ‘hacker’, a term which seems to be as vague as saying one belongs to the human race. If they belong to too a larger hacker group, they become the targets.
Their MO is one of subversion of power.
The culture jammers’ method is a cell operation, where a few people attack a specific target, then disappear. If one hacker is caught, there will be another to take his place. The cell operation is extremely hard to stop, and if the operations can be carried out through the democratic anonymity of the Internet, then it becomes impossible to stop. In fact, this is where most of the subversion is taking place, as the connectivity and the anonymity make it ideal for hackerism. The Yes Men, for instance, began with a website, which connects a person on a global scale while keeping them isolated. Your name’s Granwyth? Sure. Why not. Who’s going to know? Interviews that take place via satellite, conversions that take place over email, seem up for grabs to whoever wants to claim themselves as being true. This truth is something modernists strived for, a hegemonic grip on what is real. The Yes Men tear down that hegemony left and right, along with any concepts of what is “true”.
It is interesting that the Yes Men chose a huge phallus as a satirical prop, since the subversion of the hegemony is a feminist action, toying with patriarchical ideas of trust. Of course, some might argue that the anonymity of it all doesn’t account for liminal experiences.
The Yes Men also blur the lines between virtual reality and reality, as whatever their personas are in the virtual world are mimicked in reality. Usually it is the opposite, with AIM and Facebook displaying real people virtually, or there is a complete rift between the two, like in second life where there doesn’t have to be any relation between real and virtual characters. But the Yes Men have to become WTO members because that’s what their persona is in virtual space.
In the context of the Yes Men this might not seem like a stunning conclusion. They are only a few guys playing elaborate practical jokes for a specific purpose. But the idea of virtual technology reversing psychologies—the computer manipulating humans instead of humans manipulating computers is a large, and to some, terrifying concept. It makes me question my attachment to my computer. How influenced are we by these machines. Is the computer using me as a vessel to play out its virtual experience? Of course, it must have the most boring existence in the world if it manipulates an MFA student in Boulder, CO, where the time is equally passed between reading theory and watching anime.

Poetics of Virtual Space

Although I have many issues with Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, he does have some interesting insights into the house as a daydream space, which is both realized by the author and also realizes the author in a reifying movement. Bachelard is referring to the childhood space (in a very limiting manner by the way) as a secure, safe place which is seen always in a positive light (apparently he had a really happy childhood). However, this daydream that is both made by and makes the human agent sounds a lot like Kate Hayles theory of Informatics. Essentially it is a recursive feedback loop only instead of the loop coming between a computer and a human, the loop finds itself in memories. Bachelard applies this idea to memory space, which isn’t all that different from a digital feedback loop.
However, a large part of the digital feedback loop deals in reproduction without destruction—or how a digital image can be reproduced infinitely without limitations (essentially). Can memories do the same thing? If a memory is altered, doesn’t it destroy the original, making the new memory the genuine? That seems to put a giant knife through the heart of human agency as a form of the genuine, or essentially it makes us postmodern.
So what if we apply Bachelard’s idea of the memory to a computer. A computer can replace the original item with a new one, but it can also hold both simultaneously. It’s history, say in the cache files or your browser history, can also be manually changed through the code, wiping what one could call the genuine history out of reality. A skilled hacker would leave no traces of a coding change, which automatically calls into question the computer’s hold on what is “true” even within its own programming.
I don’t have a lot of answers here, but I found Bachelard’s memory loop toward agency something worth appropriating and overlaying on the digital realm. If computer memories are so easily alterable, then so are human memories according to Informatics. However, if those memories actually reify who we are as humans, then the ability to change memories takes on a very immediate concern. When we toy with our computers, we are really toying with ourselves. Perhaps we should have more respect for what we do with our computers, respect for our own agency, not only with words or images, but actual physical alterations. Or we can just keep downloading porn.