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Article Excerpt
A dimly lit room with a simple wooden desk and chair. A hanging lamp illuminates a kind of writing-pad embedded in the tabletop. It is a rather contemporary writing-pad: a computer screen on which words, sentences continuously appear, disappear, and reappear: "... to transfer to a records center for temporary storage ... one hand writing upon the surface of the Mystic Pad while another periodically raises its cover ... to erase, to wipe or rub out, literally or figuratively ... archivist was an officer of great dignity ..." Fragments of text flash up, fade, are overwritten by new text segments, leaving faint traces before they vanish.
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The Wunderblock (2000), by the media artist and composer Arnold Dreyblatt, is part of a series of digital installations and performance works that is concerned with the relationships among contemporary technology, recollection, and archivization. While some thinkers have argued that our increasing preoccupation with memory represents an attempt to slow information processing and "recover a mode of contemplation outside the universe of simulation and fast-speed information and cable networks," Dreyblatt's works suggest that those very media have provided us with new metaphors and models for thinking about processes of remembrance. (1)
The title of this installation, The Wunderblock, alludes to the children's toy that served Sigmund Freud as the central model for the representation of his theory of memory. As is widely known, the actual "Mystic Writing-Pad" consists of a slab of wax that is covered with a two-layered transparent sheet. When one exerts pressure on the pad with a stylus, the lower layer touches the wax slab, leaving a visible trace of the grooves on the upper layer of the sheet. If one separates the double covering-sheet from the wax slab again, the writing disappears from the surface of the celluloid and makes room for fresh inscriptions. At the same time, the earlier marks are retained upon the wax slab itself as a permanent trace. The small device's dual structure thus illustrated Freud's hypothesis that our perceptual apparatus's capacity for both unlimited reception and indefinite preservation was to be divided "between two separate but interrelated component parts or systems": the "perception-consciousness system" with its external protective shield against stimuli and the "unconscious mnemic systems" lying behind the perceptual system. (2) But Freud also assumed that "our psychical mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the form of memory-traces being subjected from time to time to a re-arrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances--to a re-transcription." (3) He therefore had to concede that the analogy between the Mystic Writing-Pad as he knew it and the psychic apparatus, in which memory is laid down "several times over" in "various species of indications," had its limitations. The permanent traces left on the wax slab were never used, rearranged, or retranscribed again, nor could the Mystic Pad reproduce the effaced script by itself the way our memory can suddenly recall experiences that left their traces on our unconscious. The restrictions of Freud's analogy reveal to what extent metaphors for memory are both informed and limited by the technological developments of their time. "Is the psychic apparatus," Jacques Derrida thus asked in Archive Fever, his extended meditation on Freud, memory, and the archive, "better represented or is it affected differently by all the technical mechanisms for archivization and for reproduction, for prostheses of so-called live memory, for simulacrums of living things which already are, and will increasingly be, more refined, complicated, powerful than the 'mystic pad' (microcomputing, electronization, computerization, etc.)?" (4)
It is precisely this question of the relationship between contemporary technology and memory, between memory and its "techno-prosthetic" metaphors, that Dreyblatt's digital version of the Wunderblock addresses. Simulating our psyche's capacity for reproduction, fragments of sentences stored on the hard disc of the computer rise up to the surface, inscribe themselves randomly on the screen, fade, are overwritten by new text segments, evanesce, and reemerge. Never can a text be perceived in its entirety. Passages of Freud's "Note upon the 'Mystic Writing-Pad,'" as well as terms from a Glossary for Archivists, Manuscript Curators, and Record Managers write, erase, and repeat themselves simultaneously: "... the writing vanishes and, as I have already remarked, does not re-appear again ... the files are usually in simple sequence as by date or number ... a memory device ... been erased, it cannot be reproduced from within ..." Although the analogy between Dreyblatt's Wunderblock, which can only draw on an already completed selection and input of data, and the psychic apparatus that is constantly confronted with new information and has the capacity for being permanently altered by new input, is limited as well, the electronic device seems to resemble the workings of our memory much more closely than the children's toy. Sentences drift into and out of visibility just as consciousness flickers up and passes away in the process of perception, just as memory-traces flash up and disappear in deliberate and involuntary acts of remembrance. Fading in and out, the words turn into traces which, when they briefly become legible, are always already left behind, traces of a script, which are traces of a...
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