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ProseThetic Memories is a text written in Virtual Reality Modelling
Language for presentation on a split screen. On one half of the screen the
text scrolls in its entirety. On the other half of the screen the text is subject
to VRML algorithmic processing. This programming, and the interaction between
the two halves of the screen, simulates the action of memory. The correlated
sound texture is either driven by a melody-generating program, written by Roger
Dean, which presents simultaneous versions of each of three sonic melody
lines, or it is performed. The events of one version find memories in that
of its partner, and there are anticipations and overlaps within and between
the melodies. Additionally or alternatively, performances involve improvised
sonic textures.
ProseThetic Memories is a collaborative, fictocritical
and cross-genre text which combines prose, poetry, cultural theory and philosophy.
It challenges traditional ideas about memory as a process of storage and subsequent
retrieval. Instead memory is seen as a dynamic process, in which the present
constantly transforms our impression of the past and vice versa. In this way
the very division of time into discrete past and present components is called
into question. Important to the genesis of the piece was Freud's notion of Nachtraglichkeit, "afterwardsness",
the idea that what is continually rewrites what has been.The concept of prosthesis
is also central to the piece because collaboration is itself a prosthetic process,
involving the adoption
of others' memories and preoccupations, and because memory is always collective
as well as individual.
VRML is by design an interactive language, in which
the user (or performer) manipulates the display as it progresses. This piece
was premiered in 2001 in Sydney, and subsequently performed in Canberra and at
other venues until 2006, in an interactive manner. In 2009 we made a permanent
version of the piece, intended for web/video viewing and listening and presented
here in compressed
Quicktime.
Note by Hazel Smith, Anne Brewster and Roger Dean.