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MEMORY TRACE

Pamela Z's MEMORY TRACE is a solo performance work exploring various aspects of memory through voice and electronics, interactive multi-channel video, sampled text fragments, and gestural movement. This work, which grew out of a sound and video installation created several years earlier, unfolds through a series of dreamlike sonic and visual episodes of remembering and forgetting.

"I can still remember the time in the early nineteen nineties when I first purchased memory. I delighted in the fact that I could hold it in my hand: a thin, green wafer etched with a lattice of metal lines. And I quickly noticed parallels between the computer’s memory and my own. Prone to anthropomorphism, I continue to compare and often confuse the two. I am interested in exploring how humans and computers store memory. How do they 'misplace' information and how do they lose it entirely? How can we differentiate between dreams, 'real' and 'manufactured' memories? How do certain sounds and aromas trigger very old memories?".

The work is performed in an immersive media environment with multiple channels of video projected on a variety of tall panels and layers of scrim populated by moving full body images, faces, and abstract material. These images combine with live voice and electronics to form an ensemble delivering a collage of stories and interwoven memory fragments. A large-scale version will be mounted at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in April of 2016.

upcoming:

April 28, 2016:
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
San Francisco, CA USA

repertoire index | large scale works | Pamela Z Productions | Pamela Z | contact

composed and performed by: Pamela Z

interactive video design: Pamela Z, Ian WInters

gesture control consultaiton / design: Donald Swearingen

Memory Trace was supported by the San Francsico Arts Commision Cultural Equity Grants Program through an Individual Artist Commission, an Investing In Artists Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and a New Music New College visiting artist residency.