MNEMOC(Y)NE
In a black cubic space of virtual reality based on panels of ATLAS MENOSYNE created by Aby Warburg, the user will be able to activate different fragments of a personal memory filmed in Super8mm, generating his own montage and relations between the sequences that are projected in the space. The exterior limit of the physical space is defined by the same films exposed in their original materiality. The project pretends to expand with time, adding images to an atlas in motion, that reports Nomadic life of the fragmented time-space and the no existence of digital borders.
CONCEPTUAL OUT LINE
Mnemosyne and Zeus procreated in nine days the Muses who provide with her grace extasy and life energy; and the arts, out of the roots of arete y tecne, value and technique, whose function is to rise the spirit, reach inmortality. In this way, heaven and memory, create the essence raised for transcendence: music, dance, drama, comedy, history, epic and lyric poetry, astronomy and sciences; expressed by Caliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polimnia, Thalia, Terpsichore and Urania. Liberal arts and sciences went further than the limited time of presence that dies every moment, giving the humans the capacity to get beyond their condition of mortals.
The invention of cinema, influential on Warburg´s work, came out of the same human need to remain eternally and reach immortality. This is the mythological component of the cinematograph, prefigured in photography: the physical process of capturing light in silver crystals, in the celuloide, allows us to transfer in substance this fragment of time/space, and arrange it, throughout montage, in different ways, giving it new sense.
Likewise, the stereoscopic vision was achieved by human beings when they began to stand up on two legs and to walk in search for new places to cover up their needs. These new visions and searches generated, throughout the history of mankind, the invention of optical devices that has marked the development of modernity until nowadays.
Despite of the algorythmic -and not analogic- configurations that determine the digital age, imagineries, gestures and myths of inmortalisation survive in our contemporaneity, as well as the need of memory: now we can move between the tangible and the virtual, intangible world, tracing our own cartographies, our own memories. This project takes Warburg´s atlas as a model and transfers it to the digital world. The social networks, invaded by ephimeral moments, visible for a short period of time, provides us an instant memory of each person who watches and publishes her or his experience.
Mnemoc(y)ne is, somehow, a way to share this vision and this memory of the world, from the cinematographic and digitalized image, understanding it as an expression of thinking our relationship with the myth of immortality and the survival in the digital age.