[-empyre-] Opening Statement from Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark

[Timothy Murray]

Hi Tim and Renate,

Thank you for inviting us to take part in Memory Errors in the 
Technosphere: Art, Accident, Archive.  In our recent media art work 
we've been "searching" for something that didn't happen or wasn't 
there. And the archives we create are imaginary as much as actual.

  In an early work, Shock in the Ear, a CDRom, we did work with actual 
memories, of shock, working with an archive of different performances 
of the "same" memory. We worked with the ambiguities of memory -- 
playing with memory, performance and performativity. More recently in 
exploring the actual and imaginary in public encounters, we have 
added the ambiguities of documenting and process based work to our 
interest in digital archives. We'd like to briefly outline our most 
recent work.

  Back in 2004, in the context of locative media and the mapping of 
memories and stories to specific locations, we started our work, 
Searching for rue Simon-Crubellier.  In this process-based work we 
did an actual search for this imaginary street, which we'd read about 
in Georges Perec's novel, "Life a User's Manual"-- searching in its 
supposed location in the 17th arrondisement of Paris and on Google. 
We documented the search in a variety of ways, and it is this 
documentation that eventually made up the installation.

  http://www.out-of-sync.com/searching/index.htm

  There is also an internet iteration of the work called The 4th 
Floor: Le Quatrieme etage

  http://137.111.156.26/~maria/4thFloor/indexa.html
  In another recent project, Talking about the Weather, we have been 
collecting breath and documenting the collection in installations. We 
are collecting the world's biggest collection of breath (quite an 
archive!) with which we will blow back global warming. The complex 
relationship between documenting, performance, and "the art work" 
interest us in the exhibition of our actual and imagined breath 
(text, sound, physical). We're particularly interested in exploring 
the intersection of performance, performativity, documenting and 
archives.

http://www.scanz.net.nz/weathertalk/installationPhotos/project.html

The collaborative blog:

http://www.scanz.net.nz/weathertalk/

http://www.weathertrouble.net/

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