Projecto Multimédia

O memorial.
A criação de um monumento à memória individual que quando assimilada e aceite,como "real", transforma-se em verdadeira memória colectiva.

Parte IV - "Their Things Spoken"

"Hegedüs´s manner of proceeding is reminiscent of a teaching method popular above all in kinder gardens and schools in the USA. “Show & Tell” is a game in which teachers ask children to present to their classmates objects possessing a special significance. They are supposed to explain the personal experience linked with the object, and so share the story with the other children. The game has an anecdotal starting point, and in it the object acts as a vehicle for the pedagogic intention of triggering communicative processes. Object and person merge via the pictorial structure of the object. Just as the anecdote has an image-like function, so the game and the artistic concept are based on the description´s pictorial character, which is reinforced by the object´s symbolic import. The anecdote – a masterful instrument of a highly developed and systematic art of discourse – recalls to the present a past perceived, through narration, as timeless. In their performative, anecdotal character, the narratives collected by Hegedüs are comparable with a mental relinquishing that allows encounters with other people in the course of speech-born self-exposure. Showing and telling is a communicative act that binds the individual to a collective. Storytelling, in the sense, can be seen as a hermeneutic activity: the reading of something familiar as new and intensive, an invention that becomes a communicative link. The comparison of personal experience in this type of DVD-ROM memory bank confronts and reativizes individual value perspectives that, taken together, impose on us a discursive perception.”

in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel; The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2003.

Parte III - "Their Things Spoken"

"The DVD-ROM storage medium allows the body of contributions to be archived exactly as they were documented. The stories stand for themselves and, like an atlas of everyday life, show a random collection of people whose relationship to the world is revealed through the objects they identify with.

In its encyclopedic structure and interactive organization, Their Things Spoken is reminiscent of Walter Benjamin´s Arcades Projects (1913-1926) likewise organized in archival form in order to be able to do justice to the nuanced diversity of temporal phenomena. One expression of Benjamin´s notion that what looks out at us from an object is the human consciousness which once produced or used it and considered the object to be significant was his obsession with the idea of being able to re-discover time as if it were a reproducible element. Hegedüs creates a representational space for this notion of a social memory that combines the languages of objects and the expression of their interpreters.

Their Things Spoken is the third part of a trilogy Hegedüs began in 1997 with the interactive installation Memory Theatre VR, a dramatically staged presentation of key moments in art and media history. Building upon the basic concept underlying its predecessor, the second part t Things Spoken (1999) builds on the basic idea of its predecessor and extends the central aspect of a collective memory store to include personal recollections and associations through which people and objects are incorporated into a relational network of communication." (continua)

in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel; The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2003.

Parte II - "Their Things Spoken"

"In its processual character, Hegedüs´concept reconstructs the evolutionary history of the collection, which have beginnings in the private curiosity galleries and “ wunderkammers ” of kings and rulers. However, modern industrial societies first perfected the conservation of objects for the purpose of public display, and at the same time conferred cult status upon the object. Hegedüs combines these aspects of a development over the centuries with the present form of digital databasing that has removed spatio-geographical restrictions on access and offers flexible user interfaces enabling the public to appropriate cultural values through new channels.
This partiality to objects was what brought more than 250 responses to the artist´s invitation. Using a Polaroid camera to document contributors and objects, and a tape recorder for their stories and comments, she imposed no restrictions on the choice of personal favorites.
Her concern was to warehouse the portraits of people and objects in the most neutral possible way, so that every image and statement is equally valid. "(continua)

in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel; The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2003.

Parte I - "Their Things Spoken"

“An Atlas of everyday lif.e."

“By the 1960s at the latest, interest was beginning to focus on the aura of used objects. Legitimized by Duchamp´s radical declaration that industrial objects were worthy of art status, the suceeding generations of artists incorporated all areas of everyday life into their artistic methods.

Today, the diminishing aura of the work of art has been accompanied by a rise in that of the utility object when used as artmaking material, since such objects refer to production conditions in consumerist mass culture yet function still as fragments of an individual biography or collective context life. Many contemporary approaches suggest that the current interest in memory techniques and their cultural effects is leaving its mark on art, too. Thus, artists ´adoption of archival structures articulates a growing awareness of the expressive power of marginal biographies that, normally submerged in the daily flood of spectacular events, seldom play a role within the “major narrative” of historical facts. Private experience and the accounts of anonymous individuals can be used to strategically undermine the monolithic consensus that dominates the official “storyline” of world history. Memory is always selective, guided by political motives, striving to meet the official version of events. Especially, the media and the public consciousness function according to the principle of forgetting and holding back information. Their Things Spoken by Agnes Hegedüs refers to the gulf between the conservation and valuation of officially recognized cultural representations and the information content of beares of personal significance originating in apparently unimportant, unknown biographies. The artist distributed among visitors to the ZKM a leaflet asking, “Why not put your favorite object in a museum?”. This question stimulated the museum visitors to reflect upon rituals of appreciating and keeping, and to relate the museum exhibits to the relics to which they attribute private significance." (continua)

in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel; The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2003.