Immemory Memory
My two useless CD-roms of this artwork that I can’t bear to throw away so I never will
Years ago, maybe 1999-2000, Chris and I bought this wonderful work of art by Chris Marker from Exact Change Press and we loved it. This is a magical artwork made by an amazing artist who thought a lot about memory, photography/cinema, and…cats. Here is a description from the article linked below:
“In the opening image of the program, you’re met with the words “Enter the Memory.” Click, and you will find a massive planet containing eight continents Marker calls “zones”: Cinema, War, Memory, Photography, Poetry, Travel, Museum, and X-Plugs. These basic categories hide its overwhelmingly interwoven terrain. Of course, this planet is finite; as a technology, the CD-ROM could infamously hold only so much data, straining even to contain grainy, seconds-long videos. Even when it was still fresh-faced in 1994, the frustrated historian Michael Punt diagnosed the CD-ROM with “hyperbole fatigue,” giving the format only a few more years to live, finding its limitations suitable only for children’s games. So with a kind of inhuman determination and focus, one could probably tour all of Marker’s zones in about four hours, like this one deft YouTube user has.“
The navigation is simple, reflective of when it was made, but it contains layers and layers of information, sound, and visuals. It’s like walking around in Chris Marker’s memory—which is a real treat. Needless to say, the rapid march forward of technology rendered it unplayable within a few years. Exact Change re-released it in 2008, updated as much as they could to buy it another year or two, and then technological progress stomped past it again and it was no longer viewable/playable unless you had a really old Mac that you never updated. I have not been able to find one of those. I recently tried hard to get at it because I wanted to share it with you here, and because I truly love it, but back in March after scouring the googles for help with this, I came up empty-handed yet again. I am not the only one, there’s a whole article about it and why it can’t be recreated with newer software here: The Deaths and Rebirths of Chris Marker’s CD Rom Immemory.
Fast forward to last week, when someone I follow on IG posted about La Jetée (probably CM’s most famous film, many of you know it without knowing it because it was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys). I happened to comment about my sad quest to look for access to “Immemory” again and a fellow reader had the good sense to dig around on the archive.org website and found not only the artwork but comments below it explaining how you can play it with an “emulator” in your browser! THANK YOU, helpful stranger (I thanked the real person on IG), you have made me very happy! I’m grateful that at least for now it’s not lost.
photo by Wim Wenders
I really love Chris Marker. If you’re interested in his work, the book below is wonderful. It even includes a little section that is the maquette/notebook for La Jetée! I confess I don’t know that much about the French New Wave film movement, but he was among the vanguard of that crowd. I love what he gave this world. I’m sad that he’s gone now, but he left us a lot of beautiful things to rifle through.
“I have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?”
— Chris Marker
Here are some links for those of you who want to know/see more!
Chris Marker, 100 — images from a recent retrospective in NYC