Memoryscopes: Remnants, Forensics, Aesthetics

Ross Gibson moves between scholarly and artistic worlds, writing about cultural objects and ideas, making multimedia works, films, poetry, curating in museum spaces, and creating installations, among other pursuits. This book arrives after decades of Gibson's creating and analyzing artworks, built from the traces that history has left lying around in archives, in landscapes, in objects, in peoples' bodies, in biographies, and in family histories. Memoryscopes is an examination of some particular modes of remembrance, looking at how the past has dynamism too; how it is a force always pushing and skewing the present. Gibson contends that this historical dynamism can be identified and dramatized aesthetically in ways that activate clues found in archives, artifacts, landscapes, middens, and collections; clues primed in some way for an imaginatively forensic treatment. These 'memoryscopes' are aesthetic forms already created, or that we might have to invent in order to contain, focus, and direct the forces of the past. [Memoryscopes is a companion volume to Ross Gibson's Changescapes.