H.M. is a two-channel presentation of a single film based on the true story of an anonymous, memory-impaired man, the famous amnesiac known in scientific literature only as “Patient H.M.” In 1953, when he was 27 years old, H.M. underwent experimental brain surgery intended to alleviate his epilepsy. The unintended result was a radical and persistent amnesia. Though he was no longer able to make lasting memories, his short-term recall, lasting about 20 seconds, remained intact. He lived anonymously in this condition for more than half a century until his death on December 2, 2008, in a Connecticut nursing home. His case is widely credited with revolutionizing our understanding of the organization of human memory.
H.M. consists of a single 16mm film that plays through two adjacent synchronized projectors with a 20 second delay between them, so the viewer sees two simultaneous side-by-side projections of two different parts of the same reel of film. The structure of the installation and the nature of the material together produce a sensation of mnemonic dissonance much like that experienced by Patient H.M.
The roughly 18-minute loop weaves together reenacted, documentary, found and animated elements and lies somewhere between an experimental documentary and an independent narrative film.
It’s the same idea that had me all excited about Gabriel Orozco’s show at the MoMA.* He doesn’t feel constrained by the collective consciousness definition of what an artist can be, or I, at least, don’t get the feeling that he’s trying too hard to create capital A-R-T. Either way, the joy is evident and in the breadth of the work there is clarity.
Like Alissa says, whatever you do becomes your body of work!
* and now that I think about it, this is the same reason that I get excited about anything. Maybe it’s also why I like reading writing about writing, I can’t find the quote, but somebody said that the business of a writer is living life, if that connection makes sense at all.
My opinion of the olympics is generally in line with @joehewitt, who tweeted: “All hail the power of marketing convincing people they need to suddenly care about these obscure, dull sports once every 2 years.”
I knew I liked this William Wegman fella. I feel I have been remiss in not reminding 20x200 collectors that he directed New Order’s video for Blue Monday.
This is so rad. Probably my second favorite* music video ever.
Like Powers of Ten, except astronomically accurate. It’s not a dramatization, it’s a map; the positioning data was pulled from Hayden Planetarium’s Digital Universe Atlas, which is available for free download.