Joshua Unikel
Listen to: Time Capsule
Digital technology and its cultural database seems to want to repeat itself. Yet that repetition, that permanence seems unlike the decay and finite quality of human memory. Though, our memories are intimately tied to our technology. I can't help but agree with theorists like Brian Rotman and Donna Harroway that we are at once individuals and part of a collective, at once physical and human as well as digital and technological.
All of this forced me to ask: is there a clear division between personal, cultural, and digital memory? Does digital technology compensate for cognitive and neurological limitations? If so, to what extent? And what meaning, if any, do video clips and sound bites of earlier eras have in later years?
"Time Capsule" struggles to convey these questions just as it struggles to convey its sound. In the place of clear answers, there is an urgency, a forcing together of period-specific found sound, a collage of cultural memory and digital technology into the confines of human memory, consciousness, and biological decay.