Protocols could be understood as formal systems for the production of informal, tacit memory. Mediums of Memory will culminate in a book-length project exploring protocols for memory as a way of seeing technology, economics, and ecology. The project’s developing thesis is that memory exists only when distributed between mediums, challenging the popular understanding of memory as data. Memory lives in protocols, not objects.
Produced for the Summer of Protocols research program, Kei’s essay-chapter “Artifical Memory and the Interruption of Infinity” provides a path through the history of memory protocols in a Western context, highlighting traditional canon and where it falls short. Beginning in 500 B.C. with a Hellenic poet to 2020 A.D. with semiconductor microchips, she looks at memory protocols as diagrams, encyclopedias, and logical constructions, and she starts to define a paradigm at play today: Orientation. Evinced by computer memory and chaotic storage, the paradigm of memory as orientation operates through abstract, associative connections, a counterpoint to the mainstream rationalism of the previous centuries. Orientation reinvigorates a lineage of memory studies championed by people like the defrocked monk Giordano Bruno as well as brings to the fore practices, techniques, and mediums centuries old and often overlooked by the traditional Western canon. This essay broadly redefines “artificial memory” to encompass such a paradigm shift today.
All memory protocols convey a specific format, medium, or tools, that is, organizing logics: the diagrams of Lull or the encyclopedias of Alstead. The artifact for this project will consider what device or technique most suits the memory protocol of Orientation.
The core, perhaps woefully naive existential, questions motivating the project include: