We Travel To and Shall Be Lost In Always
I was diagnosed with Huntington’s disease, an inherited neurodegenerative disease that causes the progressive breakdown of nerve cells in the brain and is symptomized by a loss of motor control and balance, memory loss and aggressive and unpredictable behavior. There’s no treatment and no cure and it’s ultimately fatal. In this project, We Travel To And Shall Be Lost In Always, I use video, sculpture, photography, and performance to highlight my experience with this disease that currently affects my short-term memory. I'm drawing relationships between my failing memory and the dual crisis of digital media and storage know at “bit rot” (the decay and corruptibility of digital files) and the “digital dark age” (the mass loss of digital information due to antiquated and outdated hardware and software). Digital files and storage, what Bernard Stiegler called “tertiary memory”, represent a contradictory space of inexhaustible memory but one that's entirely intangible and in danger of decay, corruption, and obsolescence. And so it is with human memory, especially one compromised by illness.
