CLOUD MEMORY
2021
Cloud memory continues the formal research on posthuman assemblages and the media archeology of information networks, here focusing on the structure of memory in its temporality and spatiality.
The first sculpture (Cloud Memory : Breath) features the shape of breathing itself, as the primary medium used by the glassblower alongside glass in the shaping of the piece and until glass itself refuses to be further manipulated and crystallizes in solid. Resting on plastic air cushions, distributed packets of air meant to support transport processes, it is held by a metal pedestal whose structure is modeled after digital memory architecture : an open grid of metal bars borrows from the physical layout of RAM modules and server-rack memory banks, where working memory is fractioned, sorted, and held in a state of high-speed suspense. RAM memory requires a continuous, uninterrupted flow of electrical current to constantly rewrite microscopic electric charges, millions of times per second, with glass serving as an insulation barrier. In this sculpture, glass becomes exhalation – highlighting the materiality of human, corporeal temporality and rhythm. The underlying question becomes then : how can we envision memory - and with it, time – when the media that subtends our current understanding of it functions at scales unintelligible to the human mind and body ?
In Cloud Memory (Lap), the work takes up the question of memory in its spatiality. Featuring a glassblown cast of a lap sitting on a - now antiquated – plastic archival filer, used for bureaucratic purposes. Memory has been historically associated with interiority – in an understanding of the human mind as holding the capacity of containment and storage. In the lap, the sculpture is tracing back the roots of containment and holding to a bodily, gendered posture : the temporal assemblage of the female lap.
Tracing a genealogy of obsolete media underlying the clouds’ architecture, it becomes a monument to memory – memory remembering itself. From bodily holding to institutional filing, Interiority is gradually hollowed out, and in repurposing the lap as a support for technology, information networks substitutes holding as a location with ‘placelessness’, mirrored in the glass’ own transparency and vacuity. In its organic shapes, the blown cast becomes almost a pareidolia of the all-encompassing, ambient cloud. The artwork, through the staging a discursive genealogy of memory-as-holding, asks the question of what becomes to spatiality – and with it, the human body – when holding is no longer but virtually distributed in space ?
CLOUD MEMORY
2021
Cloud memory continues the formal research on posthuman assemblages and the media archeology of information networks, here focusing on the structure of memory in its temporality and spatiality.
The first sculpture (Cloud Memory : Breath) features the shape of breathing itself, as the primary medium used by the glassblower alongside glass in the shaping of the piece and until glass itself refuses to be further manipulated and crystallizes in solid. Resting on plastic air cushions, distributed packets of air meant to support transport processes, it is held by a metal pedestal whose structure is modeled after digital memory architecture : an open grid of metal bars borrows from the physical layout of RAM modules and server-rack memory banks, where working memory is fractioned, sorted, and held in a state of high-speed suspense. RAM memory requires a continuous, uninterrupted flow of electrical current to constantly rewrite microscopic electric charges, millions of times per second, with glass serving as an insulation barrier. In this sculpture, glass becomes exhalation – highlighting the materiality of human, corporeal temporality and rhythm. The underlying question becomes then : how can we envision memory - and with it, time – when the media that subtends our current understanding of it functions at scales unintelligible to the human mind and body ?
In Cloud Memory (Lap), the work takes up the question of memory in its spatiality. Featuring a glassblown cast of a lap sitting on a - now antiquated – plastic archival filer, used for bureaucratic purposes. Memory has been historically associated with interiority – in an understanding of the human mind as holding the capacity of containment and storage. In the lap, the sculpture is tracing back the roots of containment and holding to a bodily, gendered posture : the temporal assemblage of the female lap.
Tracing a genealogy of obsolete media underlying the clouds’ architecture, it becomes a monument to memory – memory remembering itself. From bodily holding to institutional filing, Interiority is gradually hollowed out, and in repurposing the lap as a support for technology, information networks substitutes holding as a location with ‘placelessness’, mirrored in the glass’ own transparency and vacuity. In its organic shapes, the blown cast becomes almost a pareidolia of the all-encompassing, ambient cloud. The artwork, through the staging a discursive genealogy of memory-as-holding, asks the question of what becomes to spatiality – and with it, the human body – when holding is no longer but virtually distributed in space ?