Pamela Z's MEMORY TRACE
Pamela Z performs her intermedia perfomance work Memory Trace as part of YBCA’s New Frequencies Festival at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts at 8pm in San Francisco, CA
Memory Trace is a solo performance work exploring various aspects of memory through voice and electronics, multi-channel video, sampled text fragments, and gestural movement. This work, which grew out of an interactive media installation of the same name, was workshopped in a three-night run in the intimate Royce Gallery in summer of 2015, and now a large-scale version will be mounted at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum space in April of 2016.
"I can still remember the time in the early nineteen nineties when I first purchased memory. I delighted in the fact that I could hold it in my hand: a thin, green wafer etched with a lattice of metal lines. And I quickly noticed parallels between the computer’s memory and my own. Prone to anthropomorphism, I continue to compare and often confuse the two. I am interested in exploring how humans and computers store memory. How do they “misplace” information and how do they lose it entirely? How can we differentiate between dreams, “real” and “manufactured” memories? How do certain sounds and aromas trigger very old memories?"
Memory Trace explores these questions through a series of dreamlike sonic and visual episodes of remembering and forgetting.
Memory Trace was made possible by grants from the San Francisco Art Commission and the Center for Cultural Innovation.
Videos featuring musicians playing at this event
BREATHING is a movement from Carbon Song Cycle (a inter-media chamber work by composer/performer Pamela Z and visual artist Christina McPhee). The work was originally written for voice & electronics, bassoon, viola, cello, percussion, and tape. This is a solo version performed by the composer (with just voice, processing, and tape), recorded at a 3/13/2014 duo concert with Joan La Barbara as part of the 2014 ROOM Series. Pamela Z is using a gesture controller (designed and built by Donald Swearingen). © 2013 Last Letter Music (ASCAP)