MEDIATHEK

now we freeze in front of a frozen cascade

like losing one's focus towards too fast phenomenon.

how can we survive in the frozen cascade of this world ?

how can we save our future memories?

Tragedy of trajectory, shadowing time’s arrow in flight overhead, above no visible ground: memorandum is a non-elegy to recall, an impossible investigation into the unstable neurophilosophical events of memory itself. The moment now —simultaneous beginning, end and midway point in the linear maze we know as the temporal world— remains a mystery. An ever accelerating spiral of desires and uncertainties, of emotion and intellect, of instinct and memory —the moment we try to bring these diverse elements into a tenuous balance, just where are we? What is the locus of knowing/doing? The idea of «keeping» counterweights, the drive to «move on» is programmed into all our behaviours. An inertial momentum of unconscious retention that somehow powers the life-engine, which instinctively imagines things could always be better. When we shut out time behind closed eyes, are we seeing snapshots in an on-going album of after-images or an instantaneous synaptic cascade of frozen accidents?

Who can say what memory was before photography existed? What will come to replace cumulative direct experience as new technologies continue to overtake the thresholds of cognisance, the speed of human recognition? We stand before the falling waters, waiting for the perfect moment to plunge in. A homage to «love» caught in a frieze of frames-persecond. Illusions that would set us free of all circumstances. Desires that would place us front-andcentre in all events. Anxieties that keep us running to «get there»—but where? How then to go on notescaping the gravitational pull of remembrance even as the world bids to uproot all its yesterdays? The safe and sheltering forest of memory is no more. Nostalgic reminiscences of happy days past, sweet dreams of future memories to come —all are poised without critical mass on the brink of never, swimming headlong down a horizon-less maze toward no vanishing point.

/ CAST & CREDITS /

With: Alfred Birnbaum, Takayuki Fujimoto, Manna Fujiwara, Ryoji Ikeda, Takao Kawaguchi, Hidekazu Maeda, Seiko Ouchi, Richi Owaki, So Ozaki, Noriko Sunayama, Shiro Takatani, Yoko Takatani, Mayumi Tanaka, Hiromasa Tomari, Tomohiro Ueshiba, Misako Yabuuchi

Conception / creation:  dumb type

Visual creation: Shiro Takatani, Takayuki Fujimoto, Hiromasa Tomari

Sound: Ryoji Ikeda

Conceptual collaboration: Alfred Birnbaum

Computer programming: Tomohiro Ueshiba

Video assistant: Richi Owaki

Stage manager: So Ozaki

Text (originally written for the installation Party): Stefaan Decostere

Co-production:

Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

Créteil Maison des Arts 

Festival d’Automne à Paris 

Le Manège Scène Nationale de Maubeuge

Pilar de Yzaguirre-Ysarca, Madrid

La Bâtie Festival de Genève

The Museum of Art, Kochi

New Opera of Tel Aviv

Assistance:

the town of Ajaccio

Institut Franco-Japonais du Kansai Villa Kujoyama

Kyoto Art Center

World premiere: “Festival de danse” Espace Gérard Philipe - Le Manège Scène Nationale / Maubeuge, France, 1999

Recitation: Simon Fisher Turner, Rene Eyre

[lng/msb] http://dumbtype.com/works/memorandum | http://www.epidemic.net/ [27.04.2020]