One day the boundary of the corporeal will end and everything will disintegrate into pure energy. Only one single ocean will remain of the Earth, shimmering with waves of former flesh. Only a few birds will survive, freed from the carcasses of their cells, but not the memory cells of human language. They will fly endlessly over the surface of the ocean to find, unsuccessfully, an island on which they can rest. As they fly, they will want to repeat the words they heard in the last days of the old world. In random order, without understanding the essence, line by line, like a hackneyed song in an unknown language.
“Ocean of Memory” exhibition is a generative media installation assembled from hundreds of segments of video, sounds and texts. This is information that has filled everything around it, spilling out into an ocean that has absorbed all the individual voices. A digital broth of many, many minds, human and non-human, existing in a world where violence and pain no longer exist. All that is left here is the poetry of knowledge, which anyone who wishes to receive instantly in exhaustive quantity–learning has become a creative meditation. There has been an irreversible change in the organization of interspecies communication in this world. We can listen to the way this new consciousness breathes, we can recognize individual images, but how it decides and thinks remains unrecognizable to us. Rather, we see a reflection of our own experiences.
Introduction text by Yulia Yousma. Music production and performance by Chloë Lewer (B O K E H), sound mastering Wouter Rentema. Video installation engineer Maxim Harin.
The poem was written in 2018—2019, and presented as a generative poem “Ocean of Memory”. The poem available in the “Textual” section of the website.