Dead & Alive is a book about dead media art and technology edited by Olle Essvik and Lars Kristensen. The book brings together works from The Computer as Seen at the End of the Human Age (2022) with new essays on the effects of obsolescence in accessing archival works of art. I have two contributions included, process==structure (2022), and a new essay titled Flusser and Forgetting (2024), recalling anecdotes from my time as a resident at the Flusser Archive in Berlin (2014).
Flusser and Forgetting reflects on obsolescence through the lens of an MS-DOS system for accessing Flusser’s work created by his son, Miguel Gustavo Flusser. Drawing on anecdotes from my time as an artist in residence at the Flusser Archive 10 years ago, the text looks at how our attempts at saving memories are inevitably plagued by erasure, decay, and forgetfulness.
Illustration in essay: photo by Laura Fiorio, 2021.
process==structure explores how algorithms structure the visual, using a simple program to produce potentially endless amounts of new compositions based on data from an archive of all images analysed during my PhD research. The page layout of the book is also determined algorithmically, with no two copies of the book being the same.
Rosemary Lee. “Flusser and Forgetting.” In Dead & Alive: Reflections on Media / Art, edited by Olle Essvik and Lars Kristensen, 41–3; 108–9. Göteborg: Rojal Förlag, 2024.
ISBN: 978-91-984927-3-6