A city of digital memories
Italo Calvino - Fedora
The exhibition is located in a dark, cool room. The luminous cables are the only light sources in the room.
The visitor to the installation becomes a Fedorian - a resident of the city.
I imagine Fedora to be the ultimate future of any city that has smothered its natural landscape by spreading out a dense urban blanket of buildings, street scapes and par- king lots. Despite the destruction, Calvino’s Fedorian society has attempted to preserve the natural world by somehow transferring the collective memory of these lost lifeforces into data housed in luminous fiberoptic cables.
The city’s human inhabitants live in a world void of energy - a dark vacuum. To illumina- te this dark world, they have built their city from collected memories stored in kilo- meters of cables. These masses of cables converge in the center to form a memorial memory knot. At the center of this knot is a chair, where Fedorians can come to experi- ence vital energy and memories otherwise lost to them.