Anyone who has had the nerve-wracking experience of a
hard-drive breakdown or losing or damaging digital devices will be only too
aware of how fragile memory storage can be.
Cloud computing with its power to store vast amounts of
information in unspecified locations in the ether (though your stuff is
actually held in earth-based servers) is both wonderful and spooky.
But what would happen if a huge magnetic storm wiped all
this stored data out, in a kind of digital apocalypse? It’s a question that
writer Hari Kunzru asks and tries to answer.
Kunzru’s Memory Palace
Memory – so what is it? And what is the future of the planet
and ourselves? The internet - vice or virtue? Museums as banks of memories -
what are they good for? Can we return to a pre-knowledge state of innocence?
All this and plenty more is brought to life in a thrilling
project at London ’s
Victoria and Albert museum. The V&A, one of the world’s greatest memory
banks for the applied arts, commissioned a team of 20 artists and designers to
create a “walk-in story” based on Kunzru’s book.
The venture is accompanied by high and low-tech artworks,
including an interactive app and website called the Memory Bank.
In Kunzru’s tale, a group of revolutionaries, the
Memorialists, are trying to defy the sinister new masters of the universe - the
“Thing”. They resort to an ancient technique in which space is used as a way of
placing memories and call it the Memory Palace
The reason that the Thing wants to wipe out all memories of
the ancient golden age (The Booming)
before the storm is because it wants to introduce The Wilding, when humans
“live in complete union with nature”.
Therefore any notion of knowledge and memory – exactly what
makes us human – must be brutally suppressed. The internet is denounced as “a
conspiracy of fools and knaves, a plot against nature”. Civilisation is evil
and anti-nature in the crude world of warriors which the “Thing” seeks to
impose.
Kunzru’s story and these artists’ response to it raises
searching questions at a time when, despite the huge advances in our
understanding of natural processes, human kind is pushed towards a global eco-disaster.
In their installations, artists bring to life the mental and
physical place that Kunzru describes. They imagine London as a Mad Max world, a decaying
cityscape, providing a dramatic idea of what a post-global warming world might
look like.
Jim Kay’s exquisitely complex three-dimensional cabinet, for
example, is a shrine to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution which is banned by
the new rulers. Other illustrators, graphic designers and makers help to tell
the story.
Kunzru’s look backwards at our own age of the digital
revolution and global corporations lacks a certain edge. Perhaps it’s down to
the implied conflation of the Booming with capitalism. There did not appear to
be any struggle between the rulers and the ruled at that time.
But it’s only a story after all!
Or is it? Our rulers are constantly trying to overwhelm historical memories that challenge their power. For example, the story of the English Revolution of the 1640s hardly figures in schools or universities.
So let’s praise the collectives and individuals who created
the exhibition for asking the questions. They have thrown down a challenge to the rest of
us to take the story onwards.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
For those with access to Sky Arts, you can see Hari Kunzru’s
documentary on Sky Arts 1 HD at 8pm on June 19.
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