Brooding at the end of the world on my island of Sal in the company of my prancing dogs I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory. I wonder how people remember things who don’t film, don’t photograph, don’t tape. How has mankind managed to remember? I know: it wrote the Bible. The new Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will have to reread itself constantly just to know it existed.
As we await the year four thousand and one and its total recall, that’s what the oracles we take out of their long hexagonal boxes at new year may offer us: a little more power over that memory that runs from camp to camp-like Joan of Arc. That a short wave announcement from Hong Kong radio picked up on a Cape Verde island projects to Tokyo, and that the memory of a precise color in the street bounces back on another country, another distance, another music, endlessly.
from Sans Soleil (transcript)
yes, nice.
ahh, then that lightning bolt of electricity coming in to wipe our memories clean. we then emerge from our digital prostheses, blinking in the bright sunlight of our own hippocampus, starting anew, an oddessy of wetware memory.
—clay shirky had a great seminar on preserving digital media at: http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/
very nice.
Sans Soleil is one of my fav films…This text is most evocative…I dont know if you have seen another film on Tokyo by Wim Wenders called “Notebook on Cities and Clothes”. Its about fashion well worth a view.
...I am an interaction designer, working at the Royal College of Art, London…peeping into your blog sometimes:)
anab
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