DESCRIPTION:
Pamela Z in a live performance version (for voice, processing, sampled sound and interactive video) of her work-in-progress Memory Trace. Performance: Meridian Gallery, San Francisco, March 14, 2012.
(This documentation video was shot and recorded by Michael Zelner.)

I began work on it at Djerrassi Resident Artist Program in 2010, where I recorded numerous interviews about memory and began experimenting with collaging the voices. I continued working on the piece in 2011 at the Montalvo Arts Center, where I shot some video and created a sound & video study. As I develop the work, I have been performing bits of it as live music with interactive video.

Memory Trace will be an interactive media installation work involving multiple channels of video and audio. The projected video -- populated by moving, full body images, faces, and abstract material -- will form an ensemble delivering a collage of stories and interwoven memory fragments. The installation will respond to the presence of a viewer with changes in content, sonic texture, and visual attributes.

"I can still remember the time in the early nineteen nineties when I first purchased memory. I delighted in the fact that I could hold it in my hand: a thin, green wafer etched with a lattice of metal lines. And I quickly noticed parallels between the computer's memory and my own. Prone to anthropomorphism, I continue to compare and often confuse the two. I am interested in exploring how humans and computers store memory. How do they "misplace" information and how do they lose it entirely? How can we differentiate between dreams, "real" and "manufactured" memories? How do certain sounds and aromas trigger very old memories?"

-PZ