After watching the short film essay The Last Angel of History, I was heavily inspired by the way that technology and the practice of sampling is discussed. Writer Greg Tate states:

Well I think the word sampling technology has allowed in this area of black musical production is the creation of a digitized race memory you know and I think that what sampling allows for a generation that didn’t have access to a musical education is a way of collapsing all eras of black music onto a chip and being able to freely reference and cross reference all those areas of sound and all those previous generations of creators simultaneously. (Akomfrah)

When thinking about the possibilities of new media art, the ability to cross reference memory and history, as Tate describes, has become especially significant in creating art digitally. With this in mind, I decided to create a ‘memory synthesizer’ using three digitized home videos of myself at the age of 2, utilizing both sonic and visual components. 

Critic Kodwo Eshun describes sampling and states, “It's only when you get to hip-hop that you get the record player being used as an instrument in its own right… scratched and then used in all kinds of different terms and we could say that one thing that black producers do is that they release what I call the entelechy of an instrument. They release the potential energy which lies inert in any kind of technology” (Akomfrah). It is this idea of potential energy within technology that I wanted to explore in Max through user interaction.

The user is able to select different or the same ‘fragments’ of each of the 12 videos in order to increase their chances of seeing a certain part. This is shown in my YouTube demo through the changing of the yellow highlighted areas of each clip. However with the rapid speed in which the synthesizer randomly chooses another video, the user feels a certain frustration with being unable to control the output, emulating the struggle to authentically revisit memories even in an age of information storage and digital memory. 

In Lev Manovich’s “Database as Symbolic Form,” he explores syntagm versus paradigm. He states that new media reverses the relationship between them, stating that, “database (the paradigm) is given material existence, while narrative (the syntagm) is de-materialised… the narrative is constructed by linking elements of this database in a particular order… thus the narrative is more virtual than the database itself” (Manovich 90). I hope that by also confronting the user with the database in Max and the ability to see all of the different possibilities while the software is at work, the piece becomes a kind of  visual ‘brain’— flooding with simultaneous processes, feelings, connections, and memories.