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Memory We tend to regard our own memories as private representations of our living experiences. In turn, we say that we "share" such representations with others. It seems no accident that our language for describing the workings of human memory bears close similarity to that with which we describe objects around us. For example, we say that we place and misplace things in memory. We often describe surrounding objects as if they could be receptacles for memories. As if what these objects hold is fluid, we also describe memories as able to undergo change or revision. A static memory is indeed a dead memory. We share memories as we share objects. But does the language used to describe the fashioning of objects reflect the one used to describe the accumulation of memories? To a point. Note that objects may not necessarily be in themselves memories, but holders for them. But how then do we imagine that memories get transferred, so to speak, into objects, and into our minds? That is to say, how do we figure this process?

New media, what we make with it, depends on such values. Thus it is that we see in its artifacts the ways in which artists have attempted to make it tactile. As we have seen, the metaphors of memory have historically involved mechanisms operated with the hands, or at least experienced bodily. There is an irony in that we try to construct this sense of memory by way of a medium we also regard as destructive of memory, of the tradition of the analog bases for memory. Thus it is that we attempt to enlist analogy in an attempt to save it. This is perhaps not new. It seems constitutive of the history of our resistance to the destructive aspects of technology. But do we also resist acknowledging our dependence on technology?

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