The way we read books is changing. Memory Palace explores how a story might be imagined in a different format – as a walk-in book.
The Story
Hari Kunzru's story is set in a future London, hundreds of years after the world’s information infrastructure was wiped out by an immense magnetic storm. Technology and knowledge have been lost, and a dark age prevails. Nature has taken over the ruins of the old city and power has been seized by a group who enforce a life of extreme simplicity on all citizens. Recording, writing, collecting and art are outlawed.
The narrator of the story is in prison. He is accused of being a member of a banned sect, who has revived the ancient ‘art of memory’. They try to remember as much of the past as they can in a future where forgetting has been official policy for generations. The narrator uses his prison cell as his ‘memory palace’, the location for the things he has remembered: corrupted fragments and misunderstood details of things we may recognise from our time. He clings to his belief that without memory, civilisation is doomed.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/exhibition-sky-arts-ignition-memory-palace/about-the-exhibition/Francesco Franchi
'Here is how to remember. First you must choose a place. You walk around it, impressing every detail on your memory, until you can tour it in your mind when you are not there'.
Mario Wagner
'Then the great moral evil of the Lawlords brought the Magnetisation. An aura was seen all over the world, great waves of light shivering in the sky. They saw the great waves of light, and their screens spewed out their last sign and went dark'.
Even though the idea behind is work is great, but personally there's too much going on for me in this work and its too futuristic.
Le Gun
'The doctors performed great feats of surgery and roamed the cities, looking for the sick. It was a time of great wonder'.
Le Gun have brought to life a memory fragment that recalls the practice of medicine and doctors in a three-dimensional drawn installation. The immersive black and white piece reimagines an ambulance as a chariot driven by a medicine man and drawn by a team of urban foxes. The back of the ambulance contains the detailed body map of a patient as well as partly misremembered medical artefacts from times past.
This was such a bizarre piece of art. At first it was extremely confusing and unusual, loads of ideas and questions kept coming to my mind. Straight away it reminded me a book illustration because of its black and white theme and also of the way its been drawn. One of the first things that i had noticed was a smoking fox, and then another very upset fox as like they were humans trapped in animal bodies. The medicine man was very creepy and scary. It had pieces of fingers, bones and skulls around his neck which represented death. It also had 4 eyes and 2 mouths which meant he's not a human.
It was definitely one of my favourite pieces in the exhibition because of how many questions and emotions i felt by looking at it, also as i have never seen anything like it.
Oded Ezer
'Photoshop: A ritual conducted before going out into the world, in which the face and stomach are anointed with a powder called picksels'.
Oded Ezer has entered the time of the story and imagined different ways you might interpret type if you had lost the ability to read or write. His eight short films each interpret a playful definition from the story and experiment with things such as eating and setting fire to individual letters. His work challenges the viewer's perception of what it is to read words.
Some of the weirdest videos I have seen. Even tho my favourites were the moving mouths and the translator.
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