Spaces between totality and our forgetfulness:
Leonard Shelby, Ireneo Funes and the Empty Pocket
AA HTS Thesis
Linus Cheng Tutors: Mark Campbell, Manolis Stavrakakis, Francesca Hughes
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Spaces between totality and our forgetfulness:
Leonard Shelby, Ireneo Funes and the Empty Pocket AA HTS Thesis
Linus Cheng
Tutors: Mark Campbell, Manolis Stavrakakis, Francesca Hughes
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Content Prologue____________________ p7 Of Shelby and Funes_________ p10-45 The Empty Pocket____________ p47-53
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Prologue Contemporary personal memory exists at the threshold between the corporeal organic memory and the various digital devices which supplement it. As the volume of the web grows, our attention span shrinks. In the flow of ephemeral feeds, memes, challenges, pranks, cats and dogs we see the shifting role of the camera: from us capturing the world to the world capturing us. Between a growing library of “totality” and our equally growing forgetfulness this thesis looks at the desire and suffering of two protagonists: Ireneo Funes from Jorge Luis Borges’ “Funes and Memorious (1954)” and Leonard Shelby from Christopher Nolan’s “Memento (2000)”: the all remembering and the all forgetting. An analysis of their modes of remembrance, forgetting and oblivion attempts to unfold the contemporary condition of memories and its spatiality. IF: Ireneo Funes LS: Leonard Shelby
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p. 89 Borges, Jorge Luis, Donald Alfred. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 1970. Print.
“I was told that he had been thrown by a wild horse at the San Francisco ranch, and that he had been hopelessly crippled.”
Ireneo Funes’ departure from normality
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fig 1 01:19 Memento, Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000.
Leonard Shelby’s departure from normality
Part 1
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Of Shelby and Funes Ireneo Funes (IF): “For nineteen years, he said, he had lived like a person in a dream:
he looked without seeing, heard without hearing, forgot everything-almost everything”(1) Leonard Shelby (LS): “You can just feel the details, the bits and pieces that you
never bothered to put into words”(2) Ireneo Funes (IF) is the protagonist portrayed from the third person in Borges’
“Funes the Memorious”(3), a boy from Buenos Ares of which the narrator had met less than three times, and who gained the ability of endless, rich, visual memories of all things at the age of nineteen after the accident of falling off a horse. The idea and challenges on infinite knowledges and an all knowing entity had also been explored by Borges earlier in the Library of Babel (1941)(4), where the imperfect librarians (human) who exist in an endless array of hexagonal cells that contains all combinations of words, literature, history of the past and the future. The library (also called the Universe) begins as a hopeful connection between the human and the divine, the ability to consume
“of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways” flourished the optimism of a chance of becoming “masters of an intact and secret treasure.” Where the universe
1 p. 91 Borges, Jorge Luis, Donald Alfred. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 1970. Print. 2 00:20 Memento, Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000. 3 p. 87 Borges, Jorge Luis, Donald Alfred. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 1970. Print. 4 p. 78 Borges, Jorge Luis, Donald Alfred. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 1970. Print.
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is taken over by “the unlimited dimensions of hope.” (5) IF felt similarly at his first departure from normality; after he recovered from the fall from the horse, he felt the present to be intolerably rich and bright, and the same was true to all his most ancient memories. He is able to experience both the full richness of his trivial memories, and the way he had lived through those memories in a previous state of normality, which he now describes as “like a
person in a dream: heard without hearing, looked without seeing”. The hopefulness of infallible memories has overcome the other consequence that came from the fall: his immobility. When he later discovered this he thought of it as the
“minimum price to pay” (6). But the optimism ends in exhaustion. The incapability of humans to conceive the divine and total results in depression, chaos in the unending Library of Babel. They have had a good go at it: the official searchers, inquisitors, who often speak of the broken stairways that almost killed them, looking for the infamous words. No one expected to discover everything but they tried hard. A method that man created to digest the total library is the catalogue, they believed that they can find the catalogue of the catalogues by the method or regression: “locate book A, consult first book
B which indicates A’s position; to locate book B, consult first a book C, and so on to
5 p. 78 Borges, Jorge Luis, Donald Alfred. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 1970. Print. 6 p. 91 Borges, Jorge Luis, Donald Alfred. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 1970. Print.
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infinity ...”(7). A year later Borges devises in Funes a character that could consume the total library. Despite being able to locate time precisely at any moment, visualise and return to any time, compare the shapes between clouds in different days and grains between marbles, Funes also creates his version of a Borgesian regression in the form of an infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers (we will come back to later). This system of enumeration borrowed from the likes of many seventeenth century Universal Languages, not least the binary, as introduced by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
“...discontent with the fact that “thirty-three Uruguayans” required two symbols and three words, rather than a single word and a single symbol...”
(8)
Natural numbers being developed into a catalogue for all natural words is also an answer of the failing method of regression as suggested in the Library of Babel. However Borges also did not see light in the universal language, as the desire of order neglected the need for abstraction, a essential instrument in the process of thoughts and memories. When describing his memories IF compared it to a “garbage heap”(9). One of the hardest things for IF to do is to fall asleep, to become abstracted from the world, to eliminate the unnecessary of his universal numerication of all vocabularies. To Funes, normality is abstraction, elimination of useless work, generalisation, to go back to sleep is to go back to normality.
7 p. 80 Borges, Jorge Luis, Donald Alfred. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 1970. Print. 8 p. 92 Borges, Jorge Luis, Donald Alfred. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 1970. 9 p. 92 Borges, Jorge Luis, Donald Alfred. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 1970. Print.
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Leonard Shelby (LS) almost wishes he would never fall asleep: as sleep, like a door slam effectively resets his memory back to zero. The protagonist of Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), suffers from anterograde amnesia ever since a burglary at his house where he was attacked and fell to the bathroom floor and normal life ended. His trauma means he can no longer make any new memories. LS can only live “normally” in his pre-head injury memories, a time that he does not only long for but distorts. His memories, in normality, have a richness that can be compared to what IF can perceive everyday:
“You can just feel the details, the bits and pieces that you never bothered to put into words”(10). Physical experiences, objects, spaces, scribbles and tattoos become his way of maintaining a degree of normality in a stream of constant refreshes or resets:
“there’s thing I can know when I knock it, … or when i pick it up, see, certainty”(11)
LS tries to reconstruct his memories (that he keep losing ) using methods comparable to Quintilian and Cicero’s memory palaces(12): whereby memories are stored as an architectonic spatialisation of time and events. A chronological sequence of space allows retrieval, but only through the imaginary journey
10 00:20 Memento, Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000. 11 00:21 Memento, Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000. 12 p. 3 Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1966. Print.
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of walking through that palace. LS’s memory palace is built in his pocket and on the surface of his body. In an attempt to return to normality, he physically constructs the palace around his body. The physicality of experience is the closest thing that connects his contemporary existence to his pre-trauma normally functioning memory. If sleep is the instrument of abstraction and resets, the blitz of sleep LS is experiencing could be compared to the swiping down on a phone’s screen, the refresh button, the uncontrollable streams of feeds. For both LS and IF normality is a sweetspot at the threshold between the generalisation of abstraction and perfect documentation, between utility and secure preservation. The sovereignty in making choices in forming memories that construct a sense of time is either flooded with overwhelming richness or complete emptiness. Both of them crave a normality that perhaps, a generation that lives in the streams of constant updates, tailored news feed, is now also trying to find; a normality that lead to a specific perception and spatiality of time. LS is fully aware of the uncertainty of his present being solely constructed from his pocket. Simply by changing his jacket, he lives another person’s life, literally. After he was put in the position to kill Jimmy, a drug dealer that an undercover cop is trying to get rid off, he puts on the outfit of the person he has just murdered. He instantly becomes Jimmy: driving his car, and with a note on a coaster in the jacket, he goes to find Natalie, Jimmy’s girlfriend. An event that fundamentally sets up the rest of the plot. LS therefore creates a system that spatialises time between his skin and his jackets, by artificially constructing distances in relation to the validity of the
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fig2. Implanting Sammy Jankis
Normality Implanting Sammy Jankis
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information. When a speculative piece of information from the scribbles and photos in his pocket is confirmed as ‘absolute truth’ he writes it onto his body. Without the ability to find his own path mentally he creates the resorts to that which he believes to have certainty ---- the physical. Most of the tattoos are around the chest, thighs, hidden parts of the body except one, the name Sammy Jankis, written on his wrist. He makes sure this is the first trustworthy thing he sees whenever he awakes or is otherwise refreshed. This is also where most the distortion of veracity occurs, as the narrative unfolds the functionality of Sammy’s story, which we come to understand is potentially the story of LS himself. Through this hierarchy of data value and storage, LS’ s methodology for dealing with his affliction constructs distances between memories that the he cannot perceive. He has made Cicero’s mind palace physical in order to enhance his skills of remembrance by building a sequence of mnemonic spaces around his body to fill in the absence timeline. In Aristotle’s
“On Memory and Reminiscence”(13), he suggests that to remember is to return to the sequence of original perception, a passage of time in the mind. In his theory the mnemonic starting point becomes crucial in the process of recollection of a memory, the middle point is always the best place to start since it reduces the maximum distance one might have to travel to remember, either forward or backwards in time. LS always begins his memory at the last moment before the incident in the bathroom. Aristotle compares the insignificance of more distant memories as things being seen at a distance, memories formed further back in the linearity of time often appear obscure due to the effect of perspective and accumulation of things inbetween. But for LS, between the present and
13 Aristotle. On Memory And Reminiscence. N.p.: Alex Catalogue ; NetLibrary, 2000. Print.
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fig 3 01:02 Memento, Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000.
“Remember Sammy Jankis”
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the moment of the head trauma, is nothingness, thus the immense clarity of the bathroom scene. Later he states “how can you heal, when you cannot feel time?”(14). The strangeness of the Sammy Jankis’ tattoo plays in its serial manipulation of the mnemonic starting point: After each reset LS begins to work out what the present is by reconstructing his passage in time as things he places between his present and the incident, he lays out the notes and photographs in front of himself and the story of Sammy Jankis behind the incident, creating not only a warping of time but a distortion of the representation of the incident. By intentionally placing that tattoo on the most accessible part of his body, his wrist (like a watch it also “tells time”), he embeds this part of the memory through a process of repetition in another part of the brain, away from the damaged hippocampus. Not only does this process also allow further strengthen the effect of the rest of the tattoos in manipulating this linear passage of time, it allow the tattoos to soothe his suffering when looking back to a big, fat, bright memory in the passage of time. Through manipulation of physicality he suppresses an unwanted past. At a certain point LS encounters a conflict between notes on two separate photographs, which represent two people: Natalie and Teddy. The line “Don’t
believe his lie” written on Teddy’s photograph had led to the event of him being murdered by LS. When he encounters a conflict on the photographs, he manipulate them to convey a past that he prefers: to delete a past that he wouldn’t remember but the photographs tell him otherwise, he burn the photographs: such as the picture of the body of Jimmy Grants. However after a refresh he would be completely unaware of the intention of such changes.
14 00:39 Memento, Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000.
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In 2015 500 millions users are constructing their present through digital photographs, live feeds that are built upon Instagram, which icon is ironically an instant camera.(15) The only difference between LS’s camera and Instagram is the size, and the algorithms that now runs our pockets. In his novel “Molloy” of “The Trilogy” Samuel Beckett wrote of the sucking stones(16), story of a man with four pockets and sixteen stones trying to circulate the stones in such a way that he could consume them without ever feeling he’s repeating sucking the same four stones. He begins with four stones in each pocket, taking one from the right pocket, suck it, put it into the left pocket, then he move one stones down to the lower left, then to the lower right, then to back to the right pocket. He got to a solution of always keeping one of the four pockets empty, slowing emptying the right pocket by sucking it and passing the stone to the empty left pocket, then move the chuck of five or six stones all around back to the right pocket. Molloy struggles to work out a circulation system that avoids him sucking the same stone, as if he could notice the slight differences in shapes between them. He finally acknowledged that he can’t differentiate and settles on complexity and decides to keep just one stone that shuffles around pockets until eventually he “lost, or threw away, or gave away, or
swallowed” it. The short touched on our absurdity in ignorance towards the truth but more importantly our craving for the empty pocket as a crucial apparatus for not just consumerism but our memory. The significant of the story is that it is not about the number of stones but the presence of emptiness, essence of change, newness and the creation of space that illustrated that.
15 “Instagram: Active Users 2016 | Statista.” Statista. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Dec. 2016. 16 p. 20 Beckett, Samuel. Molloy ; Malone Dies ; The Unnamable. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. Print.
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fig 4 Which photo to believe? 01:22 Memento, Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000.
“Don’t Believe his lies” vs “ Do not trust her”
Today’s “pockets” can be emptied by our thumbs swiping down, swiping up, or by itself. We swipe to be up to date, to keep ourselves in the flow. In “24/7
Late Capitalism and the end of sleep” Jonathan Crary talks of sleeplessness as a state in which producing, consuming, and discarding occur without pauses(17). A permanent state of emergency to be domesticated through our pockets as it updates itself. The job of the flow is similar to the shuffling of stones in Molloy’s pocket, to establish a complexity that evades differentiation and in the end settles into acceptance. To be in the flow is to be synchronised, to know what’s up. If the tool of such operation is mass media then the ability to renew without leaving the pockets would be it’s greatest achievement so far. Not only in consciousness and memories, in 2016 the synchronisation has significantly altered the use of physical space: first by “Ingress” then by “Pokemon Go”: Two smartphone games that embed geographical locations into their game-play, the first by itself and the latter which embarked mass childhood memories. Thus the pocket becomes a more powerful space than a plaza or a park in regards to public engagement to space. The success of Pokemon Go, however, would not have been possible without the previous establishments of memories, and people’s nostalgia about their childhood. If there a reason for the difference between seven millions download per year ( Ingress ) and one hundred millions per month ( Pokemon Go )(18) , it is the power of the collective memory. A synchronised pocket that no longer rely on updates outside of system of its own. We also hugely enjoy the lives of others, just as LS put on another man’s jacket. We enjoy glimpsing into celebrities’ lives via reality shows and Instagram, in a
17 p. 17 Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso, 2013. Print. 18 “Pokemon Go Statistics.” DMR. N.p., 02 Dec. 2016. Web. 08 Dec. 2016.
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constant consumption of images. The stream we sync ourselves to also all rely on a Funes: an all recording computer that lives in our pockets.
“My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap.”(19) IF has the ability to compare the grains of marbles and the shapes of clouds. A million pockets wouldn’t be enough for him, if he was to suck stones, as it is almost impossible for him to perceive an empty pocket. He would have remember every single pebble/pocket configuration and slowly consumed a whole beach’s worth of pebbles if he had proceeded to suck, and even that would not have been enough. The only emptiness he could even dream of is the future, the unknown: “... Funes imagined them black [the unbuilt houses on the
edge of the town], compact, made of a single obscurity; he would turn his face in this direction in order to sleep”(20). All things in his head are in perfect chronology. Time is the only order he has in the sea of images, sensations, temperatures. But how would he recollect, if the essence of the event or object he is seeking is not directly related to the time in which he experienced it happened? He would have to go through all memories chronologically until he finds it: The failure to find order other than time. This characteristic would be dysfunctional without natural vocabularies and the Turing Machine is an example: the single linearity of time on the infinitely long stripe of paper proved the limitation of mechanical computation and that random access memory (RAM) is essential for modern computers to function. In the scale of the internet, ambitions of
19 p. 91 Borges, Jorge Luis, Donald Alfred. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 1970. Print. 20 p. 92 Borges, Jorge Luis, Donald Alfred. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 1970. Print.
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fig 5 Dog faces in Spaghetti, 2015
Google’s and Fune’s Overfitting
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alternative orders has been has been in search with search engines, a significant one being Google, where priorities are determined according to the number references one site has. The single linearity of time is also how people with Superior Autobiographical Memory(21) (essentially people who cannot forgets) recollect, according to a CBS documentary. The problem is that the order in their memories only works if you provide certain dates, without which it is in a state of complete chaos without the aid of natural language (to classify, create orders and connect images to language). This order would be what the search engines has been striving for, a hierarchy that is being generated each time differently, a hyper-textural order that is being performed based of relevance and connectivity: Performed differently each time with different users that brings with them profiles, preferences. In totality there is either no order, or an infinite set of orders. Like IF, machine learning too suffers from overfitting – both struggle with the questions of how to avoid this phenomena. Overfitting is learning from what is to all intents and purposes simply noise and its mistaken inclusion in the model, resulting in predictions of lowered accuracy. It is a failure to generalise, which is the very intention of order itself, in order to censor noise. IF, unable to forget detail and thus generalise, struggles to accept the definition of dogs:
“It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms”(22) How do you generalise when you can see and remember all the differences, 21 “The Gift of Endless Memory.” CBSNews. CBS Interactive, n.d. Web. 08 Dec. 2016. 22 p. 91 Borges, Jorge Luis, Donald Alfred. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 1970. Print.
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the grains, profiles, shades, sizes that all others does not? Without the classification induced by natural language itself IF would not be even be able to identify clouds among clouds, marbles among marbles. IF strives for a universal language that has the ability to classify the differences between all things but also has the efficiency of natural language that approximates and groups classifications. Google’s deep dream is a vivid visualisation of the same problem, though solely concerned with images: a sea of dog faces is reshaped into an image of spaghetti, as the software has been “trained” with a majority of pictures of animals. Images are being analysed with such crude generalisation that it makes a nonsense of the utility of abstraction itself. Funes responds to this struggle with two projects: an infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, and a usable mental catalogue of all the images in his memory. The first project, initiated with the intention of perusing a universal language of natural numbers, similar to early attempts by Leibniz in his Characteristica Universalis in 1666, an alphabet of human thought and later Lingua Generalis in 1668 a language that translate numbers into syllables. Such seventeenth century Universal Language endeavours led ultimately to the machine that IF’s brain mimics ... At the time Leibniz envisioned the language could be reduced universally within five years. IF determines to reduce all of his past experience to some seventy thousand recollections(23). Both projects does not make any sense considering the current scope of the internet. If the first project is the universal language (that we still use in the form of the binary) then the second is the ordering of imagery, which we don’t yet posses, or at least are
23 p. 93 Borges, Jorge Luis, Donald Alfred. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 1970. Print.
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still seeking in our struggle with overfitting). The inability to sleep is the struggle to derive abstraction from the all remembering:
“To sleep is to be abstracted from the world... To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract”(24) After Memento, Nolan directed “Insomnia” in 2002 (this time he didn’t write the screenplay), a story of a detective set during an Alaskan summer when the sun never sets. The constant daylight corrupts both the audience and the protagonist’s sense of time. A constant reminder is required in the plot to tell time, what first appears as a late afternoon chat in the wild turns out to be at midnight and after the fifth night the detective has gone without sleeping. Nolan again explores how our perception and memory of time heavily depends of the rhythm of sleep. LS’s reset function is not only triggered by sleep: in the scene where after Natalie made him punch her in the face by shaming how as to how unreliable his memories are, she removes all the pens from the house, walks out the door, slams the car door, then returns back into the house. The car door slam reset LS’s memory, and having been unable to find a pen to write anything down he is again blank - he asks who hit her. She tells him she’s been assaulted by Dodd (a guy she had issues with in business ) and successfully convinces him to help her to deal with him. To LS to write is the only way do construct a sense of time, resistant to a sea of overwhelming abstractions.
24 p. 93 Borges, Jorge Luis, Donald Alfred. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 1970. Print.
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In “Oblivion”, Marc Augé talks of memory and forgetting as being like the shore and the waves of the sea, in the echo of Lethe(25), the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology as explored by Weinrich. Between remembering and forgetting is a intricate relationship that Augé further compares to life and death, interdependent and each in some sense defined by another at the same time. In the tsunami that flooded his landscape of memories his pen became the architecture, man made structures that LS tried to build. In this analogy, similar to all other forms of documentations: from writing to photographs, to 3 dimensional scans are the architecture on the shores to us. It is a structure that provides certainty in the organic, unpredictable forms of memories. We perhaps rely on documentations as much as LS, as architecture, as a bridge between the organic and the certain, or at least the perception of it. The Japanese sci-fi manga later turned into film“Ghost in the Shell” tells the tale of a female cyborg police policewoman and her team hunting down a notorious hacker, later revealed to be simply an ethereal AI. In the process she tracks down a man with implanted memories of his families that never existed. He takes out of his pocket a picture of his “family” which turns out to be an exhausted, obscured portrait of himself.
“...the truth is, you never had a wife or kid, like he said, they aren’t real, they are simulated experience, fantasy” ... “I had a picture of her, she was there, smiling like an angel....”.(26) Manipulations again is in the pocket, our fear of the connected pockets is
25 Weinrich, Harold. Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting. Cornell University Press. 2004. 26 00:26 Ghost in the Shell. Dir. Masamune Shirow. Production I.G, 1995.
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perhaps not the total control of the content by algorithms but the rhythm of it.
“spaces and identities are constructed.... but not always by ourselves” later commented by the cyborg police on the man’s implanted memories. The automatically generated animation of the holiday photos by Google, the anniversary video pops up on Facebook that celebrates your friendship: the fear of the implanted structures on the (memory) coastline would generate distortions of memories like the Sammy Jankis tattoo to LS. One can argue that the substitution of Sammy’s memories with what actually happened ( Both LS and his wife survived the incident but LS’s condition of memory eventually caused his wife’s insulin overdoes, which was her final test on his condition ): the repression of LS’s true memories is not done by LS himself himself, as versions between the resets has no acknowledgment of each others at all, except via messages they left in the pocket, or tattoos on the body. The digitalisation of records has led to the involuntary rhythms that are being generated, due to the incapability of “the human librarian”, IF’s abstraction and generalisation would dictate the connected pockets of ours, as we accept it like Molloy. When the pocket is empty, LS would be paranoid because he would be left by himself, with no identity, no stories, anachronistic relationships between versions of himself between resets; When the pocket is filled, he overcame and embraced the falsifiability of information in the pocket. Our fear of the empty pocket comes from fear of the acceptance of the involuntary manipulations and a rhythm of resets that comes afterwards, that one has no control. In our pocket is a city above a drifting shore, where involuntary architecture are
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constantly being constructed. One of the only way for IF to sleep is to face obscurity:
“Toward the east, in a section which was not yet cut into blocks of homes, there were some new unknown houses. Funes imagined them black, compact, made of a single obscurity; he would turn his face in this direction in order to sleep”(27) Desperate for abstraction the light comes from the unknown, the yet to happen, in the hope that it will give provides informations that finally make sense of everything. All the images, events, the ungeneralisable could become useful and fall in into place in a pattern revealed by a new input. Each new event is a new hope for new patterns, a new way for an abstract structure that lends coherence to be constructed. All the unknown that are constantly being created. The blackness of the unknown houses similar to oil is the single most valuable for IF. Other than just the hope of it, blackness act as the only source for abstraction:
“He would also imagine himself at the bottom of the river, being rocked and annihilated by the current.”(28) When IF sleeps, he craves blackness, a break from the bombardment of information, vivid images and memories. In totality, he sees time far too brightly
27 p. 93 Borges, Jorge Luis, Donald Alfred. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 1970. Print. 28 p. 93 Borges, Jorge Luis, Donald Alfred. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 1970. Print.
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and he wishes not to be part of it. During the day he can see “advances of
corruption, of caries, of fatigue. He noted the progress of death”(29). To be abstracted is to be detached from time, from the continuous current. Him imagines himself in a river, being “rocked” and “annihilated”, stated the differences between his memory and the forgetfulness of the rest. The weight of the “river of Lethe” of others as their memories are being wash away also becomes where he desperately tries to derive logics from, to abstract. To make sense out of his inability to forget. Dealing with the concept of erasure (forgetting) became one of the struggles during early computer development. As nothing can truly be deleted in a digital file, indeed the very concept of erasure does not exist in the computer’s make up, the only way to remove a record is to overwrite it. The first undo command was first developed in 1968 in Brown University(30), the concept of undoing affirms that nothing is truly deleted, emptying the trash is simply de-activating magnetic charges. Snapchat tried to revolutionise the unforgeability of the internet with a social networks that “deletes” images 10 seconds after the photo or video has been shown. It was later discovered by Decipher Forensics that they were simply changing the file extension in order to deactivate the images. To be truly forgotten in digital terms is to be overwritten. The computer strives to forget, to mimic the organic: in the darkness of the river and the house the computer see lights for abstractions; many say data is the new oil(31).
29 p. 93 Borges, Jorge Luis, Donald Alfred. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 1970. Print. 30 FRESS: The File Retrieval and Editing SyStem, was a hypertext system developed at Brown University starting in 1968 by Andries van Dam and his students. 31 “Is Date the New Oil?” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, n.d. Web. 08 Dec. 2016.
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In his book “In the Flow”, Boris Groys suggested our souls in their experience of contemporaneity are “not so defined by presence of things to us as spectator but
rather by the presence of our virtual souls to the gaze of the hidden spectator”(32). In the pocket of which we consume us it also consume us. In our palms, our pockets are the emptiness, the blackness, unknown Molloy tried so hard to construct. When the past is oversaturated but yet to make sense, Funes looks to the future, the only time he can sleep is when he waits, when he closes his eyes, waiting for the blackness to reveal itself, for the oil to be burnt.
“When you close your eyes, the world doesn’t just disappear, does it?”(33) When LS closes his eyes, he remembers his wife in the richness of every details, he returns to the past, to normality. He insists his actions has meaning because of the objective truth that exist outside of his consciousness. He insists there is meaning outside of his perception because in his condition, the world, is outside of his perception. In his darkness he sees most brightly the past, and least, the present, which for him is almost constant suffering. Like his tattoo he justifies his actions through distortion.
“It’s private here” (34) said Emma. In Emma’s Tattoo studio LS had Teddy’s car license plate number (SG13 7IU) inked onto his thigh, straight after the killing of Jimmy where Lenny told him the 32 Boris Groys 33 00:49 Memento, Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000. 34 01:39 Memento, Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000.
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truth about stories of him putting his wife in coma with an insulin overdose, assuming he would forget it straight after but he managed to change his notes, to tell his future self to write the car license plate onto his body as part of the identification of the “guy who killed and raped his wife”. Despite being used as a killer by numerous people (Natalie and Teddy in the film, but it is also hinted that it has been his life after he had the condition) throughout the film, the end marks perhaps the only time LS himself initiates a murder, although his later self would not acknowledge this. Teddy seemed to know LS’s drill as he follows and pays for the tattoo that later kills him. Emma, the owner of the tattoo studio, tells him to step off, “It’s private here”, the only woman that might knows all the conflicts and contradictions LS has written onto his body, yet still goes along with it. The privateness in the scene underpins the absurdity that brings us back to Molloy’s empty pocket: the construction of truth and the ignorance that our search for the empty pocket, or truth, share.
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fig 6-8 01:29-34 Memento, Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000.
“It’s Private Here”
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Part 2
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The Empty Pocket Groys’ stated in our experience in contemporaneity our souls are “not so
defined by presence of things to us as spectator but rather by the presence of our virtual souls to the gaze of the hidden spectator”(35): at first appearance this seems a grim statement, illustrating our fear of the empty pocket, like LS, losing hold of barely coherent rhythms of the shuffling, of the flow. A melancholy of control, of modernism, totality. Nostalgia, described by Svetlana Boym(36), as an incurable contemporary condition is that of being lost in the flow, a memory obesity, losing grip of oneself.“San Junipero“(37) spoke of a love story between two girls in different age that met in a virtual utopia made out of worlds in different eras, 70s, 80s, 90s, where consciousness live eternally to their taste after they are “transferred”. The contemporary romantics finds their future in the past. The fear of the empty pocket is the struggling attempt to construct a personal narrative through a liberation from categorisations by authorities that is replaced by algorithms. It is also the question of whether this constitutes a liberation after all.
35 p.146 Groys, Boris. In the Flow. London: Verso, 2016. Print. 36 p. 36 Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic, 2001. Print. 37 San Junipero, Black Mirror. Dir. Owen Harris. Perf. Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Mackenzie Davis, Denise Burse |. Netflix, 2016. TV-MA.
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One a personal level, the journey from Molloy to Leonard is that from the modern to the contemporary: a shift from the obsession with an empty pocket to being scared of it. Scared of both the incapability of constructing a narrative by oneself, as Boym formulates it, and of the unconscious nature of the external tailoring of such narratives. The lack of distinction between private and public documentation/data has altered the shoreline of our memoires; the architectural or essentially spatial role of recording in the new state of tailored news-feeds has become a ground of thematic installations along the coastline of memories. The struggle lies in finding permanence in the temporal nature of the installations, because we are all inevitably LS. Meanwhile IF, or the computer, is desperate for the obscure, the organic, that is the shores of us. Still trying to figure himself out, the unknown, blackness becomes his empty pocket, not just because of him being afraid of repetitions but also the hope it gives for the potential of the “right� abstraction coming along at some point, in the future: not overfitting, nothing less, just right. From modernity to contemporary is also perhaps not just the shift from desire to fear of emptiness, nakedness in time but also a shift in scale of the empty pocket. The pocket begins as an immediate, personal space that
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stores personal obsessions, memories, the most valued(38), it begins as a space to keep time(39), just like the pocket of LS. Molloy’s stone sucking described his desire for the empty pocket that is also only one out of four: to always keep one pocket empty, for surprises, for the new or at least the effect of it. If keeping time is the first step of connecting pockets then the synchronisation didn’t start with the iPhone and the internet but by the time pocket watch was invented. What is, then the relationship between the connectivity and the individual, and the role of the pocket as in increasingly prominent role of this threshold? Comparing to the relationship between remembering and forgetting as life and dead by Augé, is perhaps worth a try: If data is the new oil then the computer would be the car, sucking petrol for its life. The computer, like us, or the “Hidden Spectator”, like Molloy, feeds on obscurity and the pocket, as a physical space, a threshold between us and the computer that needs to be empty. The flow in the pocket is perhaps like the shoreline that Augé described, each interdependent and shapes another. An empty pocket among four is the minimum for Molloy to feel anticipated about his stones, and IF looks for his empty pocket among us, and we search our pockets before we start our day, to make sure it’s not empty. The pocket has not just grown in
38 “A History of Pockets.” Victoria and Albert Museum, Online Museum, Web Team. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Dec. 2016. 39 “The Birth of Pocket Watch.” Pocket Watch. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Dec. 2016.
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an abstract sense with the internet but also as architecture, the museums with no collections(40) grew as our spaces of memories depositories merge into the flow. Us, maybe should think of the “hidden spectator” not as a terrifying sci-fi dystopian singularity but see it and understand it as Molloy: between our forgetfulness and the all remembering we should gain our autonomy similar to LS, it does not matter whether the future self knows about its past, where time is chopped into indigestible pieces by the flow, acts of the pocket can still altered actions between times: the physical. If any the pocket as a space of construction needs to be filled, and by us, a counter balance between the shore and the city. The flow has not defy physicality, but altered the role of it, it should be our instrument against the stream. If the pocket (the computer) updates itself regardless of us, our action that is IF’s pocket of obscurity is just as uncontrollable to him as it is to us. The man with implanted memories in Ghost in the Shell experiences them as if they were real, he believed his whole life that he had a family until he is unplugged by the police. The memories seemed so real that this story causes the reader to question their perception and autonomy of memory, where repetitions of the installations becomes architecture, same way as the Sammy
40 M+ is the new museum for visual culture in Hong Kong, which beginned withou no collection at the time of the competition.
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Jankis Tattoo on Leonard’s wrist. Or it is the state of IF, implantation through repetition or some other technique that might arrive as the sophistication of the internet develops, once the issue of overfitting is resolved, and if Funes finished his project of an image catalogues of all memories. Rather than being nostalgic about modernism and criticising our states of being
“incurable romantics”(41): the despatialised time is also a democratisation that should be seen as a opportunity to re-contextualise time, with full freedom, while IF is filling its pocket with pictures of us and before the totality finds his way to become the dystopian image that we imagined, we should take the chance and pack, tailor, construct our own pockets, because it might be the most customizable time in history.
41 p. 36 Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic, 2001. Print.
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fig 10 Memento’s Timeline
Bibliography Books
Aristotle: “De Memoria et Reminiscentia”, in De Anima, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred. London: Penguin Classics,
1986. Augé, Marc, Oblivion, trans. de Jager, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Borges, Jorge Luis, “Funes The Memorious” and “Library of Babel”, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other writings,
London: Penguin Classics, 2000. Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print. Deborg, Society Of the. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red, 1977. Print. Groys, Boris. In the Flow. London: Verso, 2016. Print.
Koolhaas, Rem, and Hal Foster. Junkspace: With, Running Room. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.
MacGregor, Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century. 2007.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Use and Abuse of History. New York: Liberal Arts, 1957.
Schönberger’s, Viktor. Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009
Weinrich, Harold. Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting. Cornell University Press. 2004.
Filmography
Memento, Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000. Insomnia, Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2002. Ghost in the Shell. Dir. Masamune Shirow. Production I.G, 1995. La Jetee. Dir. Chris Markers. Released in the U.S. by Pyramid Films, 1976. 2046, Dir. Ka Wai Wong. 2003. San Junipero, Black Mirror. Dir. Owen Harris. Perf. Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Mackenzie Davis, Denise Burse |.
Netflix, 2016. TV-MA.
Illustrations fig 1 01:19 Memento, Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000. fig2. Implanting Sammy Jenkins, Linus Cheng fig 3 01:02 Memento, Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000. fig 4 Which photo to believe? 01:22 Memento, Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000. fig 5 Dog faces in Spaghetti, 2015 (https://kver.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/spaghetti-meatballs-become-really-frightening.jpg) fig 6-8 01:29-34 Memento, Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000. fig 9 Ireneno Funes’s Pocket fig 10 Memento Timeline ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Memento_Timeline.png fig 11 SG13 7IU 01:46 Memento, Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000.
AA HTS Thesis
Linus Cheng Tutors: Mark Campbell, Manolis Stavrakakis , Francesca Hughes
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fig 11 SG13 7IU 01:46 Memento, Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000.
SG13 7IU
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Spaces between totality and our forgetfulness:
Leonard Shelby, Ireneo Funes and the Empty Pocket
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compression in UV + ifto 70k deepdream
quote oblivion
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