all-forgetting-is-retrieval

Commissioned by TACETi for the Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium, exploring the formation of human memory, retrieval, and failure. “There is a common belief that forgetting is due to retrieval failure. It is curious why this idea of permanent memory is so appealing...Storage as well as retrieval is subject to failure.”
Wearable technologies govern the behavior of temporality, with gestural tracking mapped onto discrete musical parameters. The title is perplexing and quickly disproven, reflecting the strange and unfamiliar space that, for me, the piece inhabits, with “failures” both large and small. How can we be certain of things we have experienced, and that the events that took place were not, in fact, radically different than what we remember?