mike womack

Observer Effect

Memories are not real. A memory is in fact a brand new constructed feeling that only feels like a memory. It is an in–that–moment utterly new act of creation made to feel old. This brand new memory relies on facts about the past but is contaminated with the present. Because of this corruption, the more one remembers a past event, the less faithful and true to the event that memory becomes – like the progressive fading that occurs when a photocopy is made from another copy and so on. Counterintuitively, the less one recalls an event the better the brain can preserve details of that event. A leading neurobiologist in this field, Dr. Yadin Dudai, concluded that, "the safest memories are the memories which are in the brain of people who can not remember." I found Dr. Dudai's statement to be both beautiful and heartbreaking.

This paradoxical and fragile understanding of knowledge – that to know something or recall it is to ruin it, fascinates me. I extracted the earliest memories of foundational events from my brain in the form of drawings. This was done without my conscious mind's knowledge in an effort to preserve the accuracy of the memory. I made a series of drawings while under hypnosis. Unaware of what I drew, the drawings were sleeved in a portfolio by the hypnotherapist and never viewed by me or anyone else. Without looking at the images, I cast them into blocks of concrete. My earliest memories are now re-entombed in a surrogate vault so that the evidence of their existence is visible, but can never truly be known. Any attempt to retrieve the image would destroy it.