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?