Ars Memoriae - The Art to Remember

In times when humanity, particularly in the Western world, seems to be preoccupied not only with dying but, more importantly, with dying out, the questions about legacy and commemoration become inescapable and irrevocable. What will humankind be remembered for? What kind of material traces will be left behind, and how will these remnants be interpreted or read in the far future, and by whom? And more philosophically, from the perspective of Biological Intelligence, as opposed to the omnipresent Artificial Intelligence, what does it even mean to be human?

Once intracranial augmentation of memory processes, by implanting wetware computer technology will become the norm, the difference with biological humans will be too big to be able to speak of the same species anymore. This shift towards trans-humanism will be so significant and influential that it might instigate the very end of the genus Homo sapiens sapiens altogether. It begs not only the question of how we will be remembered as a species but also how our conventional (dare we say old-fashioned?) way of remembering will be remembered. How will the stories of the rise and decline of memory aids be told in the future? And will they be told by the last representatives of our species, in an act of memento mori, or will they be told by the new trans-human entities that might not be so interested in, obsessed with, or hallucinating about their own past, the way humans are? But if they are, as a result of human source code programming, what will these new entities think (if it is still called thinking) or say (if speech is still a thing) about humanity's enduring attempts to alter their limited brains by inventing external memory devices? Will they see or calculate them as necessary evolutionary steps towards Artificial Intelligence? And what will they make of the role of Art as a prefix and precursor in the invention of the Artificial? Was art invented to help humans remember? Was it the determining driver of human intelligence?

These wide-ranging open-ended questions led to the following central research question: What role did art play within the larger history and evolution of external memory devices? Throughout my Ph.D. research project, Ars Memoriae: The Art to Remember, I analyzed this role in a variety of ways, ranging from making artworks, thinking and writing about making, exhibiting and curating works of art, and engaging in cross-disciplinary exchanges and shared fieldwork experiences with like-minded peers from many different fields of study. As an artist, I predominantly worked with material carriers of memory and utilized the power to communicate thoughts and emotions by skillfully manipulating matter. I interrogated contemporary materialism and material culture through the process of making art.

In general, I looked at material traces of remembering and the invention of an ever-changing body of language expressions, like signs and symbols, to enhance the capability of storing, recalling, and communicating. I followed the externalization process of emotions, experiences, knowledge, and information, starting in the Early Stone Age, or Palaeolithic (about 2,5 million years ago), until, in a speculative future, it was internalized again using artificial wetware, neuro-computers, and DNA coding. Rather than analyzing specific objects, places, or periods in depth, a wide variety of interlinked events, inventions, and locales were taken into account because history is not an amalgam of independent moments and momentums; it rather behaves as a rhizome or chain of interconnected activities that influence its course. Only by following the ripples that occur when a stone hits the water, going as wide as possible in all directions, can it come full circle and lead to an understanding of evolutions in deep time. The exhibition at Høyersten Contemporary is the accumulation of 3,5 years of research and the final chapter in my Ph.D. research.