Julien Maire: Memory Cone

Title:

Memory Cone

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Creation Year:

2009

Art Event Overview:

A video camera records the hands of a person organizing strips of paper on a table. The whiteness of the blank paper triggers micro mirrors that orient a section of a photographic image on a screen. These micro mirrors, activated by a video source, open up ‘photographic windows’. With his Memory Cone, Julien Maire invites us first of all to explore the nature of the grain in the image and question its apparent motionlessness. The installation functions as a laboratory for probing the material qualities of a mediated image. The status of the image in Memory Cone can neither be described as a photograph, nor a slide, nor a video nor film still. A video-image without pixels? A quietly vibrating photograph? The projection of the white paper fragments seems neither purely digital nor analogue. Julien Maire prefers a conflation, or hybridization, to a simple opposition. In Memory Cone, the combination of visual sources provokes the awareness of different generations of images. When participating in this heuristic process, the viewer turns into a media archaeologist. Whereas consumer electronics become increasingly smaller and at the same time continue to expand their memory capacity, Julien Maire celebrates the sheer materiality of a deconstructivist display, foregrounding the whole configuration of machines necessary for the production of a limited number of images. In sharp contrast with the daily visual overkill, polluting our consciousness without making lasting impressions, Julien Maire cultivates the slow process of image recuperation.

Full text (PDF) p. 64-69