If you happen to be in Washington D.C. before November 1st, stop by the Taubman Museum and see three new world networked robots at work remembering. What they actually do is filter internet noise, somehow transform what they can remember into real paint, and drop the paint onto canvas. Each robot has its own color, one red, one blue, one green and each color has its own canvas. The robots gather their data and “paint” for 6 hours every day. The exhibit is supposed to epitomize the evolution of digital art. As we know from Darwinian evolution, however, evolving takes many forms, whether it is a fish flopping out of the sea and gradually becoming a bird, or a 21st Century machine transforming data into paint. The point being that this is ONE expression of the evolution of digital art. There are many others. (see DIGIDECO.com)
The resulting canvases are interesting in that they resemble looms; large frameworks filled with vertical strings through which weavers work strands of wool or silk or any other fiber, resulting in a piece of cloth, or rug, or whatever the weaver fancies. Here, the vertical strings are composed of the drippiest of the pigments, dropped at the top, running straight to the bottom. The less drippy drops traverse only a part of the canvas, resulting in the resemblance to the unfinished woven artwork (yes, a rug or a cloth is an artwork.)
”The Remembrancer,” as the networked robots are called, was installed by Alberto Gaitán, and will be on display until November 1st. The creator describes his work as “highlighting the ultimate meaning of loss in an age of information.” Gaitán says, “Nobody has the capacity for total information awareness so we relinquish big chunks of our understanding to black boxes of knowledge whose provenance we don’t fully understand. We make important decisions and base stacks of assumptions on these. Our memories are rife with inaccuracies, and forgetting or ignoring becomes a significant aspect of remembering.”
Two centuries of Psychologists have arrived at virtually the same conclusions by methods available to them in their time. By whatever method used, the conclusion is still that only a small fraction of the information poured into our brains is remembered; much is distorted by what is already there, and much is denied or delibrately forgotten.
So don’t despair if you can’t remember where your socks are. Your brain has relegated the location to a black box!
