A.M. Smelik

Technologies of Memory in the Arts

Technologies of Memory in the Arts covers the interdisciplinary field of Cultural Studies of Memory and Trauma from an international spectrum. It focuses on art and artistic practices as technologies of memory: paintings, souvenirs, science fiction films, memorials, novels, documentaries, comic strips, and toys. Exploring the varied ways in which art produces and processes the past in global present, the book examines how art has a particular stake in the complex processes of cultural remembrance and amnesia.

Fashioning the Fold: Multiple Becomings

Nowhere is the constantly vibrating dynamic of the fold more visible and palpable than in the pleats, creases, draperies, furrows, bows and ribbons of fashion. Whilst in art history, the fold is connected to the expression of e-motion (pathos), in fashion the fold is engaged in a game of concealing and revealing the body inmotion (eros). The fluid, flowing, flexible folds of high fashion reveal a constantly closing in or opening up of the body to the world. Whereas the flexible fold of early twentieth century designs (Mariano Fortuny, Madeleine Vionnet and Madame Gres) can be understood as positioning the body differently in time through movement, the stiff fold of sculptured forms expressed through high-tech fabrics deterritorialize the body, for instance in the designs of Japanese designers (Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto) and the Dutch baroque fashion of Viktor & Rolf. For Deleuze, the fold, or the process of folding, is a process of becoming. In so far as matter can fold, it is capable of becoming. In fashioning the fold, experimental fashion designers create conditions to transform normative images of human bodies and actualize multiple becomings. This article argues that the relational notion of the fold can help us understand how avantgarde fashion opens up new kinds of subjectivity.

Technologies of Memory in the Arts: An Introduction

‘Remember me,’ the ghost famously says to Hamlet in Shakespeare’s tragedy, and like so many contemporary Hamlets, we obey the spectral past’s call to remembrance. The seemingly simple imperative to remember, however, obscures the fact that remembering can be a tricky business. Sometimes we remember in order to honour the past, even as we remember selectively and distort the past. At other times, we disremember, failing to remember what seems of little importance, or forgetting altogether. We may remember because we refuse to forget. Or we may forget what we wish to remember. By remembering, we form an idea of our self and shape a sense of our identity; thus, we end up embodying the memory that inhabits us. Yet, memory is a dynamic phenomenon for any individual, but also for a culture as a whole. Memory is affected by politics, ideology, technology, or art and popular culture. By changing over time, memory may unsettle received ideas of the past, and consequently also of the present and even the future.