Memory?

"Forgetting, not remembering is the inevitable outcome of all experience."

This is a quote that I got from www. mjt.org/exhibits/delson/oblisci.html describing the theory of Geoffrey Sonnabend.

During my studio time today, I watched the movie "Inhaling the Spore: A Journey through The Museum of Jurassic Technology" and was intrigued by the theories of Geoffrey Sonnabend. He believes that memory is an illusion that we create to overcome the knowledge that time is irreversible stating, " We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrievability of its moments and events." I agree with him. I believe that memory is a compulsory act that we do in order to try to relive our past, but they can never be exactly accurate or as real as the actually moment in time, yet can we stop having memories? I don't think so.

Sonnabend claims that "there is only experience and its decay" which makes complete sense to me and got me started thinking about how much our memories decay through time. I have decided to start recording my memories... writing down the memories that I want to focus on for my project and rewrite them every so often, without reading my previous recollections. After I do this for a few weeks, I plan to go back and compare every recollection and see what stayed the same, what changed, and what got left out of each memory. From there I will continue with the first written recollection of each one, making these the written memories that I will slightly destruct and place in the lockets. As of right now, I think that I want to record these memories through an auditory means and play them during the display of the lockets for the final show. I think it could be interesting for viewers, and invite people to be part of the experience, to play the memories audibly through headphones or some other means while they look at each piece. So for all you readers, I will begin posting my memories this week and then repost the same memories continually there after... feel free to compare and see how they change.