Characters in a Mnemonic Theater
Super 8mm Transferred to HD video, Wood Physical Structure (2009)
This installation is comprised of three separate video edits of my Grandfather's Super 8mm film collection. It is a triangular structure, housing three interpretations of this film collection. They are installed in three places, each visible from both outside and inside the space. The first two videos are in windows installed in the two doors to the structure. The third is in the back corner of the triangular structure. It is visible from inside the structure as well as outside through a center window.
This space became at once a home to live in, and a theater to perform in: a memory structure. I would use it to visit these images, to hold them in my mind. In this way, I thought of Francis Yates Memory Theater’s; structures built in the mind to house our memories and display them back to us, to organize our past in compartments, as rooms in a home to visit and live inside. Yates explains, “(memory theaters are) built of constructed mind and soul, and now that it is a windowed one … all things that the human mind can conceive and which we cannot see with the corporeal eye, after being collected together by diligent meditation may be expressed by certain corporeal signs in such a way that the beholder may at once perceive with his eyes everything that is otherwise hidden in the depths of the human mind. And it is because of this corporeal looking that he calls it a theater.”