Back-up

Film projection, glass tanks, found objects, collected water from X, hand-blown glass vessels, sound and exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art & Design in Portland, ME, 2005

Back-up is a multimedia installation that investigates lived perception and memory, examining how the past is embedded within the present and shapes knowledge and experience. The work poses the following questions: What are the obstacles to memory? How is memory stored and retrieved? Where does remembering reside in the body?

In computers, memory occupies a fixed physical location: information is encoded, stored, and accessed through software and hardware. In contrast, human memory resists such clarity. Its equivalent of a “hard drive” lacks a single site; instead, memory is distributed across sensation, movement, rhythm, and duration.

The installation establishes a phenomenological context in which experience is both physical and direct. Viewers are invited to participate in a slowed encounter that unfolds through visual and auditory perception, engaging the senses prior to interpretation. The work emphasizes subtle transformations over time, particularly the evaporation of water and the traces it leaves, registering time as accumulation and loss rather than narrative.

Back-up examines the convergence of past and present as a foundation for meaning. Absence or invisibility often asserts itself more powerfully than what remains visible. Slowness functions as a mode of remembering, while quickness characterizes forgetting. Between these states, memory flickers: unstable, embodied, and continually rewritten.