Reintroducing Deleting
...WHAT ABOUT DIGITAL MEMORY?
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Professor Victor Mayer-Schönberger in his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Era (2009) adresses the challenges of digital remembering, and how digital technology overrides our ability to forget. He suggests to "make forgetting just a tiny bit easier again than remembering-just enough to flip the default back to where it has been for milennia, from remembering forever to forgetting over time". How do we negotiate, though, the balance between forgetting and remembering? How do we choose what to preserve and what to erase from our digital memory? Maybe it is easier to "forget" what is painful, what is embarassing, wrong or badly made, an unwanted accident, and so on.
What about, instead, we decide to erase something good, nice, and valuable? something which we have put a lot effort into?
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Using as starting points Mayer-Schönberger's solution of information's expiry date, and the meaning of ephemerality (literally) as that which lasts only for a day, I decided to start a series of simple digital experiments, exploring the gesture of deleting.
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The first experiment took place within the context of Free Performance Art, curated by artist KYRAHM, on the 2nd of May 2020, and the form of a new video-performance, created and produced within five days (27th-1st of May). The final output was online for public viewing from 00:01 am (Italian time zone) and remained online for just 24 hours - a hyperlink was shared through the festival's platform and in my Facebook profile. At the end of the twenty four hours the video was permanently removed from the platform, the specific video work would never become public again, nor would be submitted to open calls. I did not keep documentation of the process (images, stills, trailer, or traces), and as final action I recorded the deletion of all the files from my computer (raw material, project and related files). I I will not attempt to remake the work.
Format: Ephemeral Videoperformance (= video work that lasts 24 hours from the moment that becomes public)
Title: "DELETE #1"
Date: 2nd of May 2020 (00:01)
Expire time: 24 hours later.
Venue: online festival: FREE PERFORMANCE ART (a project created and founded by the artist KYRAHM)
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Perform
Expire
Delete
Note: Considering that the last 10 years "videomaking" and "performing for the camera" have been integral components of my personal artistic expression, the idea of losing or erasing "important" data or actual outputs can be quite stressful. With live performance it is different; you know that this an event that can never be repeated, and experienced regardless its documentation. A performance belongs to the "here and now". A performance is meant to disappear. As Pegghy Phelan states: ‘Without a copy, live performance plunges into visibility – in a maniacally charged present – and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control’. Any documentation of that event transforms the work into something else. In the context of screen-based works, though, the digital performance can be viewed more than one time and every time will be the same. It is there, in the cyberspace, and meant to stay floating in that space.
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Often due to a technical problem or a simple mistake, work of hours or days can be lost, making it difficult to retrieve material. I have been in that place and it has been, at least, frustrating. However, for some reason, at this moment, I am more interested in the choice to delete something that I do want to keep...Maybe, it doesn't make sense and I waste my time. Maybe, I am simply dizzy, and saturated of how dominant the digital technology is in the context of (my) daily life - especially during coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak...Not sure how it will be felt teh moment of deletion of your own work...In itself, as gesture or action can be completely irrelevant, but it is somethign that has to do with the fear of being forgotten, erasing parts of your ego...let's see
DELETE #1
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27.3 GB
215 files
9 folders
Deleting starts with your heart getting faster,
τα χÎρια κάνουν άσκοπες κινήσεις,
and then you take a deep breath
while you let the mixed feeling wash you over
like when you are under a waterfall.
And then you put a song,
and you dance,
while you give a sad smile to the empty room.
Un vuoto.
empty b ut lighter
Invane and vane simultaneously.
And so what?
ΝÏŒημα? Τι είναι αυτÏŒ?
Time (not) to be wasted.
The tear doesn't fall.
It oscillates on the threshold.
Anyway, you will be forgotten!
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Deleting starts with your heart beating faster.
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The last place where the data of the ephemeral performance were stored, was this SD card. For a moment, I did thought to keep it. Who would know? Does it matter, anyway?
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Or maybe the last place where the performance was stored was in the memory of the viewers.
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After one year I went back to Leonora asking what she remembers. Leonora responded the following:
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Recuerdo tu manos en la tierra, tu espalda iluminada, la piel iluminada y el rostro del cual salen piel, tierra, manos. La tierra es tu cuerpo. Y hay tiempo para la ironía, para jugar a volar debajo de un paraguas en mitad de un jardín británico, desaparecer y aparecer. Como un cuadro de René Magritte: Esto no es una mujer, es el universo.
¿Un gato? Quizás no había gato y es la imagen de un recuerdo de otra imagen.
Un fragmento final tu rosto, tus grandes ojos griegos, oscuros, enmarcados por esas cejas espesas tan intensas como el viaje de Ulises, enmarcadas por la luz. Un antifaz que oculta el rosto y saca a relucir el alma a través de la mirada. El frame final.
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Translation:
I remember your hands in the earth, your illuminated back, the illuminated skin and the face from which skin, earth, hands come out. The earth is your body. And there is time for irony, to play at flying under an umbrella in the middle of a British garden, disappearing and appearing. Like a René Magritte painting: This is not a woman, it is the universe.
A cat? Maybe there was no cat and it is the image of a memory of another image.
A final fragment of your face, your big, dark, Greek eyes, framed by those thick eyebrows as intense as Ulysses' voyage, framed by the light. A mask that hides the face and brings out the soul through the gaze. The final frame.
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