Quick post on Future Everything gig.
Jane, Mike and I set up the memory shed in the Oxfam Emporium, Oldham Street, Manchester on Tuesday. We’ve been collecting memories on to surrogate objects so that the things people buy in the Vintage shop along the street are ‘possessed’ by other peoples memories!
Plus gave my talk at the conference today, went well I think. Not sure people got the punch line – possessions are ‘things’ that are possessed!
The point is that the RememberMe work from last year associated the memory of a previous owner with an object that they donated to Oxfam. In many ways this readdressed the balance between the immaterial and material instantiations of the artefact.
This year we wanted to push the balance beyond 1 memory for 1 object, and out weigh the material with many more immaterial instances.
In preparing for my talk yesterday it occurred to me that as people purchase the second hand ‘things’ this time around they are actually buying an object that is possessed. Possessed by the memories of multiple past owners that are loaded in to the QR tag that the shop assistant attaches to the otherwise innocent material artefact. The idea obviously evokes the concept that a person may be possessed by an unwanted demon but since artefacts are now becoming part of the Internet of Things, we can assume that they will become liable to ‘possession’ from all quarters. The consumer doesn’t expect a memory, least of all a memory from another place or artefact. So the use of the artefact as a ‘host’ for a re-materialisation into the world is akin to what Regan went through in William Friedkin’s movie The Exorcist.
Hopefully not nearly as traumatic as Regan’s experience, or for her family who interacted with her, nevertheless buying something that is loaded with other memories may be on the increase and when discussing our ‘possessions’ we should be careful what we say.
My point is that as tags (barcodes, RFID etc.) increasingly become a conduit to the web, what they bring back from ‘the otherside’ may not be what we expect. The talk and paper below speculated that with the advent of tagging 2.0 technologies such as TalesofThings that allow us to write back to objects via tags, that memories of things that no longer exist may be attached to objects. For example I have fond memories of taking digital art students up to see the Sensation show in London, a highlight being seeing them emerge from Tracey Emin’s tent. Since then the tent was destroyed in a fire at the Saatchi warehouse in the east end of London. However the memories remain in a public and cyber consciousness. So as not to loose these memories I may choose to attach them to a totem, a host or surrogate object – let us say a carriage clock on my mantelpiece. The carriage clock has nothing to do with the tent, but I need something to attach the memories to.
What then of the carriage clock? Is it now possessed by another object? How does my interaction with my clock change because holding it now evokes memories of Emin, tents and Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995?
It is this dis-possession, re-possession and ultimately ‘possession’ of things that the RememberUs artwork is intended to explore, and a personal fascination in how the meaning of ‘things’ within an Internet of Things may become dynamic. But as I cited yesterday, Richard Coyne reminds us that Heidegger always knew that things were events, and that the artefacts that we call things are only the fall out of events and conversations.
If you saw yesterday’s talk and want more, the related short paper was recently published in Interactions:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1962445
but feel free to email me for a PDF copy
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