Thursday, April 24, 2008

Interventions of memory

I believe that James Benning's film, One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later, is a good example of intervention involving memory. The film begins with images that are matched to their correlating audio and then 27 years later the same shot is presented with the corresponding audio from 27 years ago. The audio in this case poses itself as a place mark on a visual memory map, if you will. The audio triggers memories that were created 60 minutes prior and causes your mind to recall visual events. The visual events that are displayed in your mind's eye are visual representations of what you stored as a memory to your reaction to the visual. Your mind stores the memory of the audio and then searches to match the original audio with your original visual memory which is also combined with the current visual display, creating a new memory unique in it's self. So, in this way, James Benning has created an intervention of conventional memory making, by evoking your visual memory to recall an event that corresponds with the same audio.

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