Project description:
The Colonization of Memory is a procedural meditation on the way space becomes meaningful in the context of time and the way those meanings are overwritten with each new epoch. The chance operations of the procedure stood in for the aleatory path of history, while the writers played the historical subjects of those procedures.
The Colonization of Memory is an instantiation of the exquisite_code procedural artcode that adds elements of a "locative corpse," a writing game that stages an exquisite corpse (cadavre exquis) across a geographic space. The exercise directs writers around a geographic area, in this case Bergen, Norway, on a regular schedule between specified stations. At each station, the writers find on a sticker a bit of text, the last lines written from the last occupant which they then extend within their assigned constraints. A simple "lookup table," cross-referencing the numbered index of the station with the occurrence of particular letters in the text just written, determines the next station for the writer. Writers carry all completed texts with them until the end of the exercise at which point the texts are recombined serially to produce one narrative for each location.
In addition to location, three other constraints directed the authors: an epoch, an emotion, and a symbol from the primstav, a Norwegian runic calendar tied closely to religious holidays and the agrarian cycle. Having drawn their constraints, authors applied the same ones to each location they visited. Of course, chance and artful neglect of these rules also played their part, as the exquisitors at times could not locate the previous text or became lost like poets are wont to do.
These constraints kept the authors locked in the symbolic order of Bergen's calendar and history as they imagined stories that lived or would live in these spaces. Picking up where the last text had left off, the piece offers history as both palimpsest and relay race, the fragments linking disparate times becoming recontextualized, narrated into new and different times and tales.