EN / SLO
Menu
19/04/2023 19:00

Memoria

19 April–12 May 2023
Aksioma | Project Space, Komenskega 18, Ljubljana

In 1981, Canadian author and cyberpunk novelist William Gibson published Johnny Mnemonic, a short story in which Johnny, the main character, is a data trafficker who has undergone cybernetic surgery to have a data storage system implanted in his brain. The system allows him to serve as secure storage for digital data too sensitive to transfer across the net; but it becomes a problem when data stolen from the Yakuza are uploaded to his brain.

Shot in 2021 – the year in which the plot of the story takes place – and during a pandemic (another Gibson’s prediction), Memoria implants this narrative on contemporary Cuba’s reality, and contrasts the imaginary of the Internet in 1980s Cyberpunk literature with the contemporary Cuban experience of the Internet as a particular conglomerate of differing horizons of technical and social possibility. The work examines both sci-fi, as well as real-world alternatives to the mainstream capitalist consumerist version of the net that we are left with today, envisioning more decentralized, (net-)neutral, non-commercial iterations of the web.

As a collaboration between a media artist, an anthropologist, and a Sci-Fi writer, Memoria is based on long term ethnographic fieldwork on Cuban alternative data distribution networks. With online access heavily restricted by the government, but also the US trade embargo, Cuban citizens have found a way to distribute all kinds of web content in the form of the Paquete Semanal (The Weekly Package), a one-terabyte collection of digital material compiled by a network of people with various forms of privileged internet access and circulated nationwide on USB sticks and external hard drives via an elaborate human infrastructure of deliverymen, so-called Paqueteros who, like Mnemonic, physically bring the content to the remotest corners of the island. The most recent evolution in a 40 years long tradition of piracy – illegal yet not explicitly contrasted by the state – the Paquete Semanal forms a sort of offline version of the

Internet and contains any kind of entertainment and cultural data. Memoria is an immersive four-channel expanded cinema installation with specifically developed software and hardware components. Its narrative is presented on 4 synchronized screens that merge live-action footage with found footage from videos that have circulated in Cuba through the Paquete. To represent its protagonist’s loss of memory, the work will slowly “die” during the course of the exhibition, thanks to a custom system that corrupts both the audiovisual material as well as the devices on which the project files are stored.