Eleanor Dare: Lost memories and embodied traces

Lost memories and embodied traces in the Marriage of Eliza Dagworthy 1915

Like many people I have gaps in my memories, and thus in the symbolic narrative of my life. Before the age of nine my childhood memories are largely without detail. By and large those years may therefore be described (at least by convention) as ‘lost’. As a visual artist and artist-programmer the notion of such an aporia or cognitive deficit is particularly problematic. In the absence of representation what, if anything, can be retrieved, and what exactly can be communicated to others? In a wider philosophical sense such questions of representation and stable meaning have a high degree of cultural urgency. Indeed, Marita Sturken (1999) urges us to examine the ‘cultural encoding of forgetting as a loss or negation of experience’ (1999: 252). Her question ‘what is an experience that is not remembered?’ (234) is one of the fundamental riddles of my own childhood. Must such experiences be framed as a ‘loss of self’, a ‘loss of subjectivity’ as Sturken asks (243)?

Lost Memories and embodied traces is a computationally based project about the representation of my missing childhood memories. The focus of the project has been to explore the notion that memory is not an exact replica of events but is pieced together in a dynamic process that is strongly influenced not only by past experiences but by social contexts and sensory responses. In this colloquium I would like to present my ideas for the Lost Memories and Embodied Traces project, explaining how the project attempts to establish a theoretical framework for embodied autobiography. My attempts to address my own amnesia have so far taken the form of generating two artist’s books and writing image manipulation software that uses EEG and GSR (Galvanic skin response, sometimes known as a ‘lie detector’) biosensors. The research has also drawn upon Philip Ausslander’s notion of ‘the performativity of performance documentation’ (the title of his 2006 paper), Peter Fritzsche’s paper ‘The Case for Modern Memory’ (2001), and, of course, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (2000) among many other sources. I will also screen a short film demonstrating how my embodied software and subsequent electrocution alters the photograph of my grandmother and childhood carer, Amelia Dagworthy.

link to a short film of my electrocution and embodied image manipulation here:

http://eleanordarephdjournal.blogspot.com/2011/01/blog-post_23.html

Eleanor Dare is a fine artist and lecturer in Arts Computing, at Goldsmiths College. Her practice centers upon the meaningful capabilities computation has to offer new book forms. Her doctoral research is primarily concerned with embodied and situated digital narratives.