emilehermans.com
In 2022, research into the art of memory coincided with one of
my oldest external hard drives crashing. Efforts to save data were
futile. But it did open the door to the memory palace and enabled
me to seek similarities between the crashing of a hard drive and
(as the story of Simonides* goes) the collapsing of a dining hall.
Following the architectural mnemonic place system, the most
common type, has led me from superimposing Ramon Llull’s
volvelles onto hard drives, to storing temple plans on punch
cards, to recreating my childhood home in the void of an image,
to imagining an evacuation plan as a mental map of an SSD
diagram, to, ultimately, descend the spiral staircase of
Rembrandt van Rijn’s Philosopher in Meditation (1632).
my oldest external hard drives crashing. Efforts to save data were
futile. But it did open the door to the memory palace and enabled
me to seek similarities between the crashing of a hard drive and
(as the story of Simonides* goes) the collapsing of a dining hall.
Following the architectural mnemonic place system, the most
common type, has led me from superimposing Ramon Llull’s
volvelles onto hard drives, to storing temple plans on punch
cards, to recreating my childhood home in the void of an image,
to imagining an evacuation plan as a mental map of an SSD
diagram, to, ultimately, descend the spiral staircase of
Rembrandt van Rijn’s Philosopher in Meditation (1632).
inscribed hard drives, wooden plints in the exact dimensions of the drives (7 x 11 x 1 cm each) | Jacquard punch cards (about 7 x 28 x 4 cm stacked) | Hollerith and Remington Rand punch cards, plexiglass frames (14 x 25 x 1 cm each, framed) | models in passepartout cardboard, walnut wooden frames, glass (20 x 30 x 6 cm each, framed) | offset prints on transparent sheets (layered), aluminum frame, glass (27 x 33 x 1 cm, framed) | exhibition handouts: inkjet prints on packed paper (about 30 x 21 x 60 cm stacked) polyptych – 2022/2023