The Arena of MemoryThe years of manually sifting through these "mountains of data" in preparing the various projects gradually resulted in an interest in presenting the living environment in which data is stored, archived and brought to life within a form which would involve the public. During a period spent researching the "T" Files at the British Public Record Office in London in early 1993, I was struck by the meeting of "high-tech" with the antiquated mounds of decaying paper file folders. Through a complicated bureaucratic system of monitors, runners, helpers and guards, digitally ordered files (often on parchment) were "dug up" in an unseen underground chamber, and then gradually transmitted with a human conveyor belt to the reader above, who's clip-on remote beeper notified him that the file had arrived.
This experience posed questions for me as to the role of and documentation in the recording of history (collective memories) and auto-biography (individual memories). How is the past remembered "as it passes from living memory into History?." (6) In oral societies, what one could personally and collectively remember or historicize, that which has been called a "living memory", could only be recollected through the recounting and repetition of traditions. Events only have meanings for the individual in so far as they inform the collective and confirm shared traditions and values. It was the vocal, musical, and visual imaginations that fought in a continual battle against the fading away of information by acting as a living storage mechanism. Hence the importance of selection: not all information can be selected for retention; one could speak of a collective "forgetfulness" as well as a memory. Furthermore, in the circular time of oral societies, history is in a sense identical to memory and dreamworld, because any chronology of historical events is absorbed and reinterpreted into non-linear narrative, which serves the goals of collective meaning. Memory functioned to negotiate transitions from past to future. With the advent of "Manuscripts", the holy texts which form collective identity were written for the use of privileged elites, yet the islands of narratives which survived from "pre-historical" time were not corrected into the uniform timelines of what we now understand as "History". In the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries there occurred an accelerating mania in the collection of artifacts and material records in spaces designed for access and display. These "kabinetts", museums and archives were no longer repositories of shared values but of the objects supposedly representing them. The "pseudo" science of History accepts only the authority of "documents" to remember and interpret the past for us. The world can now only be understood through its external and often "official" vestiges and traces. The "internal" memory of self and mind, explored through psychological reflections by the analytical method mirrors the external one. We search and scan both our "mind-selves" as well as our physical and virtual archives for buried meanings which may hold some sort of "key" to connect with what has been lost to us. We attempt to fabricate a personal identity in "historicizing" our autobiography by scanning our memories and linearizing them, much as a historian re-constructs and reinterprets events in the past. But just as the rapid piling up of material records overwhelms the archivist and historian, so do our fractured selves have difficulty in assimilating the information overload of the postmodern age. We live only in short-term Memory and the linear narrative structures of the past seem inadequate in navigating and accessing our endlessly expanding long-term storage capabilities. I began developing a concept for what later became
"Memory Arena" with Fred Pommerehn in 1992 but
it was not realized until February 1995 at Kampnagel
Fabrik in Hamburg. This was followed by performances in
October 1995 at Marstall/Bayerisches Staatstheater as
part of the Spiel.Art Festival in Munich. In "Memory
Arena", over five hundred readers, both invited and
voluntary and representing all professional levels of the
"city-site" participate in multiple
simultaneous readings from individual files created out
of "Who's Who in Central & East Europe"
(now grown to over 1,000 pages) within a very precise
temporal and visual environment. In reflecting the past
in the present, a politician might be given a text to
read which concerns revolutionary figures in the
Austro-Hungarian empire; a theater critic may be given a
list of theater pieces or newspapers from Central and
East Europe between the wars, a worker at the zoo might
read a text about a director of a Zoological Institute,
and so on. The functioning of this memory-machine-factory, a temporary institution in its own right, is made visible and coherent to the public by their participation in the inner-workings of the event by taking part in readings, passing through administrative stations, and making use of the archival holdings. The hand-made files of the nineteenth century are contrasted with the digital database, as runners themselves manually carry information from place to place, chalk boards inform and telephones ring. In contrast, navigations through the data base are displayed on computer monitors throughout the complex, and texts are simultaneously projected on the Memory Arena Data Wall as they are read. Yet Memory itself remains in a "pre-literate" dreamtime as the autobiographical fragments are recanted, intoned and heard purely as unamplified sound in space, soon to be lost forever.
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