elise.at

The Memory Canon

Project | Interactive Media Installation (2014,2021)

The individual voices of the canon are recorded on CD, memory cards, floppy disks, HD, magnetic tapes, MD, paper, parchment, vinyl, wax cylinders... and stored on shelves. They are the voices of Hades, eternal and yet frozen in their perishable media. Spread out in the room various devices – tape machine, CD player, computer, gramophone, MiniDisc player, MP3 player, phonograph, record player – wait for their playable memories, ready to extract their individual voices.

The visitors are the actors who reproduce fragments of this canon in ever new variations and bring together the stored memories with the devices for reading and playing back. It will never be possible to hear this canon in its entirety, its perfect form, its ideal state, because destruction is inscribed in each reading.
Do you hear me?
English translaltion: Kimi Lum

Memory Canon Ines Rieder
commissioned by galerie michaela stock as part of the exhibition Gedankenwelt der Ines Rieder
for Edison phonograph, record player and cassette recorder

voice: Ines Rieder (interview particles from the Stichwortarchiv)
piano: Manon Liu Winter (part of Virus #1.2, Elisabeth Schimana 2012)
Special thanks to Marlene Rodrigues, Stichwortarchiv, Wiener Phonomuseum and Christian Wittmann