May 27, 2013

The Transience of Memory

As I was working on my portfolio (Coming Soon, I hope?) I needed a picture of an important painting that slumbered safely in digital peace on a DVD -- or so I thought. It didn't. The disk that was worth is weight in gold refused to work. It was now worth its weight in dust. So my thoughts went to Dalí's famous Persistence of Memory

The present problem is that memory won't persist or insist at all. Pull the plug, burn the fuse and all that we know and love is gone -- and with poor backups, digital amnesia or total oblivion is a fact. So it is very fitting that I took my electric pen for a nightly stroll to make The Transience of Memory. 

The Transience of Memory (c) Joakim Ceder 2013

(Click on the image to see it better. And in order to see it even better, one might Order a Fine Print...)


Poor girl. You see hints of electronics in her skin, you see more than a hint of circuits in the waves. There's information on the melt all over the beach, and the once-functional computer has become a different kind of fruit...





 
 --- I found a better copy, eventually. And sooner or later I may show it to you, in a picky selection of my very best works -- don't know precisely when. Farther along, I see other digital obstacles towering in the mists. I make myself ready to climb.