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 will take place within the context of Free Performance Art, curated by artist KYRAHM, on the 2nd of May 2020, and it will take the form of a new video-performance, created and produced within five days (27th-1st of May). The final output will be online for public viewing from 00:01 am (Italian time zone) and it will remain online for just 24 hours - a hyperlink will be shared through the festival's platform and in my Facebook profile. At the end of the twenty four hours the video will be permanently removed from the platform, the specific video work will never become public again, nor will it be submitted to open calls. I will not keep documentation of the process (images, stills, trailer, or traces), and as final action I will record the deletion of all the files from my computer (raw material, project and related files)and share it. 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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