MEMORIAL NUMERIQUE (digital memory)

By Herve All

"What matters to us in our day is not only the unusual encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table, but the sudden passage from the fictive to the real. I imagine something that would begin with a sentence and end with a rope. Or a sound that falls on the ground, - and suddenly it is a stone The rope, we hang ourselves there, do we not? And the stone, it kills you?" Trans.]- JEAN TARDIEU This artistic project questions the foundations of writing as an under-base of the History of Humanity, through the dialogue of the machine with the maintenance of the man sic] and the mutation of our language.The machine is apprehended here as a surrealist gambling tool. The poetry presented in this tool is so widely democratized, a writing tool that can echo the jolts of the unconscious.The first memory support, stone is now supplanted by the machine that manages our relationship to memory, to its transmission, and that necessarily influences our present. This machine, democratized, interferes very strongly in our relationship to language (sms language, new vocabulary) and comes to induce a rapid mutation of our communication.In this room, the machine behaves like a filter, a catalyst of the verb which is entrusted to it. The machine is fed by the verbal food that I transmit to it, then the regurgitated matter is reinjected into this increasingly closed circuit.Process: I make a reading, I record my recitation using the telephone. The phone automatically translates the stated text into words; I then record the text obtained after the various "passages" of filters by the machine.The words which take place in the text in place of the originals are those of a word that is linked to the present world, to a highly contextualized societal environment, and therefore to a collective consciousness. (The first transformed word is "youtube".)The projection that one can make of their experience on these random words gives a new life to digital production, which becomes an extension of our Freudian unconscious. (We think of the slip of our sms, relayed as trophies of everyday life on the Internet).The gradual erosion of the phrase until its total disappearance, after all the regurgitations, is transcribed on the stone through a selection of "chosen pieces".Among the 152 passages of deformation of the initial text, four are retained and inscribed on granite stones placed on their base (A Himalaya blue, two Black African, a pink granite veined). The fifth stone, a granite, will receive no text, hosting an mp3 player and its headphones, in which loop the 152 texts scanned by the artist.Stone engraving using a sandblast, a computer-assisted industrial technique, presents itself as a continuity of the machine, its "armed arm". It is also a continuity of the semantic erosion it offers.This installation questions how we store virtual memory and how the machine can grasp the human message, as in the pre-Christian era "the literal sense was not the true meaning": "There is always Another sense, the hidden meaning and it is that which counts" is to seek the hidden dimension, that which governs the communication between the elements that interests me here.The machine opens a dialectic peculiar to itself, the voice of an epoch, using only the filter of the world which builds it and its evolution. Eliminating the false semblance of language (the brain cannot translate to perfectly verbalize what the individual feels or observes) to draw from it the matrix substance that nourishes its temporality, the reflection (mirror) of those which is reflected in mass society...During the dialogue I can not help but notice a synchronicity in places, a mirror effect, a response sent back by the machine to its interlocutor.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1984356194
• ISBN13: 9781984356192
• Release Date: January 2018
• Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 164 Pages
• Weight: 0.43 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"