[-empyre-] November 2007 on -empyre- : Memory Errors in theTechnosphere: Art, Accident, Archive

[andrew burrell]

On Nov 10, 2007 11:18 AM, Norie Neumark <norie5 at mac.com> wrote:
> If a memory comes from someone else's perceptive filtering but is now
> your own memory, there feels like some sort of weird lag there,
> between their perception and your perception... Do you experience that lag when you
> encounter the place you remembered through their memories?

yes, i believe there is a lag on a variety of levels. a lot of this i
believe is created through imagination (which in many ways i see as
being the future tense of memory, and is vital to the processes of
perception and recall) and the role that nostalgia plays in recall and
retelling (to self or another). In many ways we continually encounter
this lag, memories shift and change and at the same time the thing
remembered has shifted and changed since it was originally perceived.

> Do your own,new perceptive encounters with
> that place refilter and alter those acquired memories?

yes, and this is why this lag is bearable. as soon as we have a new
perceptive encounter with something we have already formed memories
of,  these memories are indeed altered and shifted to allow a
reconciliation between the current perception and our memory. this is
not a process of obliteration, but as i have said, of reconciliation.
this is why i was able to navigate the town i had never been to -
memory, imagination and perception collide and it can become difficult
to split these three process apart. (Mary Warnock wrote extensively on
this.) perhaps this is also why, when you finally meet someone of who
you have a very strong imagined memory image (memory mediated by
imagination), and almost instantly you know that they are not how you
imagined them, but you also find it impossible to remember how you
previously imagined they would be. ?


-- 
andrew burrell
http://www.miscellanea.com