recently

Untitled (maquette for a dynamic installation)

2011

3-ply waxed linen cord

Approximately 4" x 2 1/2" x 2"

neurons, synapses, other research, and sources

A neuron processes and transmits information by electrical and chemical signaling (synapses).  The adult human brain contains roughly 100-500 trillion synapses.

     In a chemical synapse, the presynaptic neuron releases a neurotransmitter that binds to receptors in  
      the postsynaptic cell (usually embedded in the plasma membrane).

     In an electrical synapse, pre- and postsynaptic cell membranes are connected by channels capable of 

       passing electrical current, causing voltage changes.

The word synapse comes from synaptein, coined from the Greek syn- (together) and haptein (to clasp).

A neuron is made up of the soma (cell body), one or more dendrites, and an axon.

     The cell body of a neuron frequently gives rise to multiple dendrites, but never more than one axon.

     An axon is a special cellular extension that arises from the cell body.  It can (t)ravel as far as 1 meter  
       in humans. 

     Dendrites is also a crystal that develops a multi-branching, tree-like form (like snowflake or frost     

       patterns on a windowpane).

    Sensory neurons register touch, sound, light, and other stimuli affecting the cells of sensory organs.

    Motor neurons receive signals from the brain and spinal cord, cause muscle contractions, and affect      

       glands.

    Interneurons connect to other neurons within the brain or spinal cord.

At the majority of synapses, signals are sent from the axon of one neuron to the dendrites of another.  Exceptions include neurons without dendrites, neurons without an axon, or synapses that connect axon to axon or dendrites to dendrites.

Significant areas of neurogenesis (the creation of new neurons) in adult humans are in the hippocampus (consolidates information from short- to long-term memory) and the olfactory bulb.


The Thalamus relays the actions of the Amygdala, Hippocampus and Hypothalamus and is the control center for the Limbic System.
     The Amygdala is responsible for strong negative emotions like rage, fear, and aggression and    
        positive emotions like affection and love.
     The Hippocampus forms long-term memories, interprets memories and may trigger fear and
        loathing.
     The Hypothalamus controls expression of emotion and can generate feelings of panic and anxiety in
        some situations.  It also deals with emotions like rage and pleasure.

Memory is as much a reflection as it is a progression, a creation of something new.

Sources/Key Words:

Synapse

Neuron and parts -

   Soma

   Dendrites

   Axon

Neurotransmitters

Greek/Roman ideas about memory (e.g. Plato and Aristotle)

19th century memory research

Memory drum (see Georg Elias Muller)

Ebbinghaus - Studies on Memory

Gustav Fechner - Elements of Psychophysics

Frederic C. Bartlett - Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology

Adam Zeman - A Portrait of the Brain

on form

What is form?
How does one arrive at a single, particular form, leaving all others?
Does there need to be significance in the overall form or can it be a result of the material(s)/process(es)?
How do issues of scale, and the work's relationship to the body, play into the selection of a specific form?
Is the form of a piece part of its structural concept or is it an addition to it?  (By this I mean to ask if an overall form adds conceptual depth to the idea behind its structure, or if it serves to conceptually reinforce the structural elements.)
Is the form based on an existing physical object or could it be a representation of something invisible to the (naked) eye?
Can a form or structure be simultaneously linear and circular?

source: the man who mistook his wife for a hat

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

Oliver Sacks

Touchstone: New York, 1998

Seattle Public Library

616.8 Sa147M 1998

On "musical epilepsy:" Such epileptic hallucinations or dreams ... are never phantasies: they are always memories, and memories of the most precise and vivid kind, accompanied by the emotions which accompanied the original experience.  Their extraordinary and consistent detail, which was evoked each time the cortex was stimulated, and exceeded anything which could be recalled by ordinary memory, suggested that the brain retained an almost perfect record of every lifetime's experience, that the total stream of consciousness was preserved in the brain, and, as such, could always be evoked or called forth, whether by the ordinary needs and circumstances of life, or by the extraordinary circumstances of an epileptic or electrical stimulation (137-8).

source: in the shadow of memory

In the Shadow of Memory

Floyd Skloot

University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln and London, 2003

Seattle Public Library

B Sk45i 2003

In his Confessions, Augustine likened memory to a great harbor receiving "in her numberless secret, and inexpressible windings" all manner of sensory information, each bit entering by its own gate and laying up there for later retrieval.  This notion of memory as a harbor also intrigued the great Irish painter Jack Yeats.  "Memory Harbor, 1900" is an early masterpiece collecting images that Jack Yeats would draw upon throughout his artistic career, as though the harbor itself ... were a repository of one life's meaning  (31).

"No one creates," [Jack Yeats] once said, "the artist assembles memories" (31).

Skloot contracted a virus in 1993 that ate holes in his cerebral cortex, affecting the function of his short- and long-term, episodic and semantic memory.  In the first part of In the Shadow of Memory, Skloot writes about his experience with being brain damaged, interlacing his mishaps and thoughts with scientific research and facts.  In an unexpected turn, the second part delves into his family history - his childhood in Brooklyn and Long Island as well as his relationship with his mother and brother.  Skloot concludes the book by offering reflections on his father and brother's deaths, and on his 90-year-old mother's growing dementia.  Throughout the book, he ties his personal history into his current condition.

knots

A knot is a symbol for memory not in its capacity as a mnemonic device, but rather, as the latin word memoria, as representative of both memory - the broken thread - and imagination - the knot that reties it.

a million beginnings

Our thoughts are always changing, our emotions are always changing, our stories are always changing.  We're not who we were yesterday or who we will be tomorrow.  We're not who we were in childhood or who we will be in old age.  If we really look, all these thoughts, emotions, and stories are impermanent and constantly changing.  They appear because of the interdependence of certain causes and conditions.  These causes and conditions have their own particular time span, and when it's exhausted, then none of these thoughts, emotions, and stories remain.  They appear because of the collision of a particular set of causes and conditions.


Sogyal Rinpoche
"The Remembrance of Past Lives from the Tibetan Buddhist Perspective"
On the Sea of Memory




A few memory-related articles that have caught my eye recently:


The Human Ecology of Memory

Memory and Epistemological Problems of Memory (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)



The Beautiful Recollected (Memory and Beauty in Plato's Phaedrus)

preliminary bfa documentation

For H. Ebbinghaus, A Study of the Decline of Memory

2011

Waxed linen, glass, cork, and lead

64" x 64" x 100"

progress, part two

progress, part one

bfa show card

fascination and a maquette

Photo by Scott Moore

As time passes, a thread of memory grows weak.  Its connection to fact becomes tenuous and, at times, is all but absent.  It overlaps and intermingles with other memories, causing further disorder and forgetfulness.  When the thread is ultimately broken by these losses, imagination must be relied upon to reweave it.  Thus, the memory is rewritten according to time and situation.  This process of remembering, albeit fragile and mysterious, is endlessly dynamic, creative, and fascinating.

source: on the sea of memory

On the Sea of Memory: A Journey from Forgetting to Remembering

Jonathan Cott

Random House: New York, 2005

Seattle Public Library

362.19616 c8271o 2005

'Memory' isn't just a data bank of pieces of information.  Memory pretty much covers everything we know and feel, and need to know and feel, to function - on every level (16).

Luis Buñel: You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives.  Life without memory is no life at all... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action.  Without it we are nothing (27).

It's said that memories are imperfect reconstructions of our experiences.  We remember how we have experienced not the events themselves but rather the remembering of something.  One might even say that the act of remembering itself creates a brand-new memory of that memory (86).


Richard Restak: Photographs as metaphors for memory [are] too static.  You can't modify what's in a photograph.  It's a more dynamic process, it's modifiable by experience... (86-7).


Richard Restak: Your brain is changing moment to moment as you're reading and talking...  In each moment the brain and memory are being changed and altered a little bit, they're not the same as they were a few minutes ago. And they're everlastingly dynamic (87).


Richard J. McNally: When we recall a memory, we reconstruct it from elements distributed throughout the brain.  Of course, when there are permanent records of the remembered event - a literal videotape, for example, or historical archives - we then have a sort of gold standard against which to compare the accuracy of our recollection.  The fact that memory is reconstructive and not a videotape means that memories are always "false" to some degree (109).


One of the fascinating things I discovered while working on this book is that the Latin word memoria was the old term for both memory and imagination (110).


Constantin Stanislavski: Time is a splendid filter for our remembered feelings - besides it is a great artist.  It not only purifies, it also transmutes even painfully realistic memories into poetry (138).


In Arabic the word dhikr designates both repetition and remembrance (159).


"Even inside my head," [Floyd Skloot] writes, "there is a feeling of being lost, thoughts that go nowhere, emptiness where I expect to find words or ideas, dreams I never remember."  It's haunting (200).

breaking and reweaving, a proposal

Title

For H. Ebbinghaus, A Study of the Decline of Memory

Physical Description

At the top of two parallel walls, I will string lengths of clear fishing line between small eye hooks that are placed 2" apart.  From these monofilament strands, I will hang 1,024 lengths of white, waxed linen thread in a square formation.  Each linen strand will be broken, its frayed ends contained in a thin glass vial that is sealed on each end with a small cork.  The glass vials will follow the shape of Hermann Ebbinghaus's Curve of Forgetting, shown below.  The linen strands will be anchored at the floor with small, round weights, which will sit in small holes drilled into a square sheet of plywood.  The wood will be painted black, to match the rest of the space.

Materials

3-ply waxed linen thread cord

7 mm outside diameter glass tubing

5 mm cork stoppers

1 oz cannonball sinkers

Clear fishing line

Eyelets

a layering experiment, part two

a layering experiment, part one

memories are made of this

Memories Are Made of This: How Memory Works in Humans and Animals

Rusiko Bourtchouladze

New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Cornish Library

QP 406 B675 2002

Memory: Retention or recall of learned information (8).

Every instant we are remembering something.  But how are memories formed?  And why, if remembering is so ordinary, do our memories fail so often?  What is happening in the brain when we remember a face, reconstruct an image of a place we have visited, or search for an answer that we think we know?  Does memory storage imply the fixing of memories in particular chunks of the brain tissue, or is it a dynamic, biologically creative process which involves many different sites in the brain?  How long do different memories last?  What do genes have to do with memory?  And finally, what do the memories of different species have in common? (13).

Hermann Ebbinghaus' 'Curve of Forgetting:'

The letter T in the Curve of Forgetting represents training, or the introduction of information to a subject.  The Curve charts the retention of this information up until about one month after introduction.

Most memory loss occurs within a short time after training; once the memory has survived that barrier it is much more stable (9).

Repetition gives longer-lasting memories (9).

Spaced training - repeated training sessions with a rest period in between each one - produce longer-lasting memories than do massed training (9).

In describing those who have experienced amnesia as a result of serious head trauma, Bourtchouladze writes, It may sound strange, but the recovery of memory depends not so much on the relative importance of the events forgotten as on the time before the injury that the events occurred.  Although memories often return in an irregular, hit-or-miss order, the older memories typically come back first (24).

All memories start as episodic, but only unique experiences survive as time goes by.  Those that do not have freshness and characteristic flavour tend to go downhill with time. ... Sameness leads to forgetfulness, as seen through the eyes of the writer John McPhee in the novel Silk Parachute: "When your mother is ninety-nine years old, you have so many memories of her that they tend to overlap, intermingle, and blur.  It is extremely difficult to single out one or two, impossible to remember any that exemplify the whole" (28).

Much of what we retrieve from memory may be hidden from our conscious awareness.  The central question is therefore: are we always aware that we are remembering? (36).

Here [H.M.] is, as seen through the eyes of Milner and colleagues, fourteen years after the operation:

H.M.'s severe anterograde amnesia persists... During three of the nights at the Clinical Research Center, the patient rang for the night nurse, asking, with many apologies, if she would tell him where he was and how he came to be there.  He clearly realized that he was in a hospital but seemed unable to reconstruct any of the events of the previous day.  On another occasion he remarked, 'Every day is alone in itself, whatever enjoyment I've had, and whatever sorrow I've had' (46).

beginning research, again

The greater the span of time between the historian and his subject, the greater the loss of factual evidence and the greater the imagination required to reweave the broken threads.

Robert Edwards

Sources:

Memories Are Made of This

Rusiko Bourtchouladze

Cornish Library

 Memory: A Very Short Introduction

Jonathan K. Foster

Seattle Public Library

Memory

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Memory: Remembering and Forgetting in Everyday Life

Barry Gordon

Seattle Public Library

Human Memory

Roberta L. Klatzky 
 

Memory: History, Culture and the Mind

Edited by Thomas Butler

Seattle Public Library

Memory and Attention

Donald A. Norman

Cornish Library (BF 371 N6)

Funes, El Memorioso

Jorge Luis Borges

Seattle Public Library

Opening Skinner's Box

Lauren Slater

Cornish Library (BF 198.7 S57 2004)

The Mind

Richard M. Restak

Cornish Library (QP 356 R47)

time passes, the second installation

Time passes and I am still sitting here, pen in hand, unable to speak.  If only I could find a way to write about the things I don't remember.

2010

Installation

The second incarnation of Time Passes was installed in the Alumni Gallery at Cornish College of the Arts (Seattle, Washington).  For this installation, the text-covered quilt blocks were pieced and draped over the table, with the pen placed on top and the inkwell nearby.  The blocks recall a human presence, and, at the same time, suggest the possibility of additions to the unfinished letter.

time passes, the first installation and performance

Time passes and I am still sitting here, pen in hand, unable to speak.  If only I could find a way to write about the things I don't remember.

2010

Installation and performance

The first incarnation of Time Passes was installed in the student-run By Us, For Us Gallery at Cornish College of the Arts (Seattle, Washington).  The installation included several performances where I, the artist, sat in the Gallery and hand-wrote memories on unpieced quilt blocks.  A few samples of the text follow.

Dear Martha,

I am having trouble beginning, as always.  This is not as easy as I thought it would be, taking the time to sit and remember. ...

... I suppose my writing betrays a certain acute sense of loss.  It is an idea that I am constantly fighting with - it is  deep, dark hole, but it is also a very beautiful and poignant feeling (and, however strange this may sound, it is also somewhat sustaining).

I have felt this way for a while now - more precisely, for about the past six years.  Since Carl lost half of his leg as a result of complications from a stroke, you have been much different too.  Your lucidity has gradually declined to the point where now, you hear an imaginary radio station that only plays good music and has good news.  At least this seems better that your mental state four years ago, when you were much more lucid but much more depressed.  You also seem convinced that I am married and am carrying a child.  That, at least, is not so arbitrary - I am practically married, and I have carried a child that is no longer with me.

Forgive me if I seem scattered.  Memory can be an evasive beast.  Forcing it is nearly impossible.  If only I could find a way to write about all of the things I don't remember - not to bring them back, but to realize why I commit to memory the things I do. ...

... It seems inevitable for me to bring up the concept of sadness in this letter.  It is, without question, the one feeling that drives me.  Like the feeling of loss or longing, it is somewhat sustaining.  Sadness is inescapable for everyone, but in my life it has been a pervasive theme.

What is sadness?  For me, it is an evasive and deceptive beast, much like memory.  Often when I feel sadness it seems to have no particular cause.  At other times everything around me makes me sad - my body, the rain, the passing of time, a certain kind of light... the causes are innumerable.  Where does this feeling come from, and where does it go once it leaves me?

In many ways I have the same relationship with beauty.  It is transient, impossible to catch and hold, like sadness.  Maybe they are actually the same feeling, just wearing different masks. ...