Walter Benjamin’s twenty-year Passagen-werk attempted to develop an alternative way of writing history, one in which artifacts were allowed to speak for themselves. He saw the progress of history as a growing pile of debris made up of multiple present experiences. In the objects of history, he recognized a synthesis of the collected material histories of objects and the mental imagery that define objects in the eyes of the viewer. For Benjamin, a collection of artifacts is capable of rendering history without narration or theoretical framework because objects hold both the process of their development and their conceptual essence. The method becomes a dialectical relationship with that world, which in turn, is represented not as an all-encompassing totality but rather in terms of specific material and experiential constructions.”

 

The word collage comes from the French “coller”, “to paste.” The idea of fastening pieces together, of mixing them in variation, all to stir the imagination and evoke the presence of objects is as old as culture itself. In scrapbooks, grangerized texts in Europe, and in performance or storytelling objects in Africa and America, collage is principally tied to memory. As a memory technology, such collage serves as both a launching point and crossroads from the ordered juxtaposition of distinct pieces, stories extend like mathematical singularities outward, while simultaneously pulling distinct forms onto its imaginary stage. The dual character collage, a zone where objects exist alternatively as objects and referents, provides a way of understanding how memory plays off our physical and social environments.

 

Since Plato, memory has been likened to marks etched upon wax tablets. A notion revived in cybernetic models of the brain where memories are stored in bundled packages of data existing within our neural nets. Memories are constructed as copies of sensory experience, existing in the mind. For many years neuropsychologists have sought the elusive trace of memory or engram in the tissue of the brain without positive results. These metaphors neglect the everyday creation of memory technology in scrapbooks, libraries, photo albums and audio recordings which point to a distributed system of recollection. Such concepts of memory negate compositional power and intentionality by obfuscating memory’s link to remembering. When memory is reconceptualized as an act of living consciousness, the objects of memory can be seen as linked to larger accounts and stories. Listening attends to the whole field of sound as a partner in the unfolding of time and space, acting upon and being acted upon in a mutual intensity, underscores a relation to sound and its inherent situatedness through the lens of time.

 

Recording not only serves to create new memories, but also to approximate, guide and kick-start existing recollections. But such functions become all the more intensely engaged when one listens to a recording- a form of supercharged recollection that facilitates and expedites our very act of remembrance, and goes further to extend the stylistic and chronological range of our immediate biological memories. Recording, as a way of honing the listener’s perception of interpretive individuality, allow immediate and interspersed comparison between performances. As the recording informs the listener in changeable symbiosis with their aural memory, more or less ignored where recollection is strong, and engaged with full attention wherever the memory comes up short.

 

Jacques Attali and Henri Bergson have addressed the difficult question of what impact infinite reproducibility has had on memory, habit and subjectivity. To help understand recordings as commodified memories of specific time spans, I turn to Attali and his analysis of what he calls “the repetitive economy” of mechanical reproduction and its tendency toward stockpiling. Bergson assists with comprehending the complex dynamic between past memory and present moment, and with describing the different forms of remembrance that recordings represent. Memory is a large and multifaceted subject, clearly, and here we must consider it as a commercial-social construct, a historical resource, an everyday effort that humans accessorize more and more in the twenty-first century, and a participant in formation of musical texts. Sound recordings are in themselves memory objects comprising a specifically apportioned span of real time.

 

Recordings have empowered us with entirely new kinds of surrogate musical memory, blurring distinctions between remembering and imagining and allowing us to think we can hear and recollect far beyond the fickle recesses of the individual person’s inner ear. Bergson’s contemporaries tended to understand memory as a present-to-past process where recollections are stored more or less precisely and can be retrieved or returned to. At the point where the sensation enters the memory, according to this perspective, the memory becomes free from the object that instigated the memory. Bergson revised this view, saying that such conceptions represent an illusionary, surrogate, or prosthetic manner of recollection and force subjective memory to follow a graphical model of history. According to him a person constantly verifies the memory to be against the object, and in that sense memory formation is a cooperative effort: “Any excitation which leaves from the object cannot stop en route in the depths of the mind. It must always be returned to the object itself. Instead of being a discrete entity that resides in the past, memory is a process of past to present where the recollection achieves actualization in the present moment in the form of current perception and bodily action. The memory resides in and lives for the present, where it shapes perception and physical action, and for that reason there can be no returning to a specific point or aspect that we might choose to “recall” from “the past.”

 

In visual arts texture is rendered through the application of materials, whereas in the sound piece it is made possible through the function of the sounds. I have tried to mix sound, technology, intimate memories and objects to elevate the scrapbook like recordings to artistic documentary. I view sound- the medium of my practice- as the creation of memory technology. In ‘Memories of a Place in a Space’ the sound recordings display their environments in a painterly fashion. Out of the mouths of bystanders and pedestrians come a palette of colors and a variety of surface qualities, but what shape them are the distinct undertones of the environment. A variety of perspectives are displayed by letting distinct voices cross each other. Transcribing speech historicizes a language event. Oral interviews, aside from their value in contributing to a people’s history, display the pattern of thinking their value through memories, through events and communities. Beyond creation of authentic individual records, speech documents are descriptive of neighborhoods and occupations through the special way people use language. The formal or causal tones one uses to describe events are indicative of social structures. Every phrase is a language event relating the history of the verbal gesture, conveying identity, style, community and culture. When we speak, the words we use are inherited from the vast reserves of time and cultural interplay. The language world we live in is built by the slow culmination of choices. It is our social inheritance. The everyday construction of language events, the bricolage of words, clichés, and semantic units, mirrors the construction of consciousness and community identity. By recording voices the piece evokes both the speakers and the speech situation. For a moment the speaker enters into the recording.

 

The box is a metaphor for a container of memory and by collecting and carefully juxtaposing found sounds in small, boxes, I have tried to create aural poems in which place, form, texture, and sounds play together. The recordings were chosen carefully; although many held no intrinsic value alone; only when combined did they reveal a deeper meaning. I am interested in finding poetic connections of meaning between disparate sound environments. Using things we can see, I have made a box about things we cannot see: ideas, memories, fantasies, and dreams. This act turns everyday sounds into mysterious treasures.