Tuesday, June 3, 2025, from 6-8pm
Chris Marker's Immemory: Gutenberg Version
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Presented with Exact Change
In 1997 Chris Marker produced a CD-ROM, a work that is now impossible to view on a modern computer; a later iteration for the web is similarly indecipherable, built as it was upon a software platform, Flash, that is currently defunct. But towards the end of his life Marker desired, and began to plan, another version of this piece, one which takes advantage of a technology far older than compact discs: the book.
That desire has now been realized by Exact Change, the publisher behind the original edition of Marker’s work. To celebrate its release we’ll be hosting a reception at Light Industry, where we’ll be joined by Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang from Exact Change and the volume’s editor, Isabel Ochoa Gold. Guests can stop in to browse and buy the book in our lobby and, at their leisure, wander over to our theater space, where they’ll find a screen recording of a reader making their way through the multimedia memoir, as well as a fin-de-siècle Bondi Blue iMac on which it can be played directly. (The bar will be open throughout).
Marker’s project here was one that approached memory not as a history to be chronicled but rather a geography to be explored. “My working hunch,” he explained, “was that any memory, once it's fairly long, is more structured than it seems. That after a certain quantity, photos apparently taken by chance, postcards chosen according to a passing mood, begin to trace an itinerary, to map the imaginary country that stretches out before us. By going through it systematically I was sure to discover that the apparent disorder of my imagery concealed a chart, as in the tales of pirates. And the object of this disc would be to present the ‘guided tour’ of a memory, while at the same time offering the visitor a chance for haphazard navigation. So, welcome to ‘Memory, Land of Contrasts’ or rather, as I've chosen to call it, Immemory.”
FREE