Lost in the Memory Palace | The Dark Pool
lived becomes a part of history that can never be fully explained. The audio component of The Dark Pool is thus essential to the work's story-telling function. From Mnemosyne, the rememberer, we know that a story is formed through memory and verbally recounted to be passed on in the form of remembrance. With each re-telling, events are forgotten and additions are made. The story evolves with each listener, becoming a seemingly limitless pool of facts, fictions and memories. Operating within the sensory registers of both the visual and the aural, the construction of The Dark Pool emphasizes its occupation of space and of the viewer's existence within it. The viewer is both an interruption of its silence and a necessity for its completion. Their movements enact a form of echolocation, in which the things are perceived through the recognition of reflected sound. The manipulation that is possible by audio and recording technologies, our ability to hear and re-hear the sound tracks again and again, ruptures the continuum of space and time in which verbal narration—story-telling—has historically functioned. The viewer's temporality, as that of the sound tracks, activates the static accumulation of the archive and parallels the dynamism of memory and shared history.Catherine CrowstonCurator Catherine Crowston, The Dark Pool, Walter Philips Gallery, Banff, Alberta, 1995 (brochure).