The Future of Memory - ArtReview

As memory and data blur, will we remember everything? And does remembering everything mean remembering nothing? "The root of men's problems is memory," states martial artist Huang Yaoshi, a character in Wong Kar-wai's arthouse classic Ashes of Time (1994). The film revolves around the dialectics of remembering and forgetting; in it an anonymous desert's shifting sandscape suggests a geological palimpsest of writing and unwriting memory at the same time. In the age of information saturation, people are entangled in the present technoscape of an attention economy that keeps altering.