by IOANA VREME MOSER
— durational sound installation, 2023
OCT 5, 2023, 6 PM, MX – Corneliu Miklósi Museum
Visiting hours: Oct. 5, 2023, 6 PM – 11 PM
Oct. 6-8, 3 PM – 11 PM
Mineral Amnesia explores in sound the evolution and decay of the first erasable programmable silicon memory. Encapsulated under quartz windows, made of pure crystal, EPROMS, now outmoded microchips, lose information once exposed to light. The installation salvages EPROMs from different generations and plays them under discrete Uv light until their sounds are eroded and disappear.
The project traverses the Digital Dark Age and its shadows through the perspective of an obsolete device. In 1971, researchers at Intel invented the Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory, adjacent to the first Microprocessor. With their influx under techno-capitalism, computational power doubled every second year and accelerated even more so today, in pursuit of artificial intelligence. This exponential growth has caused digital information to be unretrievable, lost in old hardware bodies such as these EPROMS, and dumped to form toxic wastelands across the earth’s geological layer.
From the 8k-bit capacity in the 2708 EPROM to the 1Mbit, the project reanimates these chips from the past and probes events from their genesis. Some EPROMs found programmed from the 70s transform the information into sounds, and some disclose voice tales. Light becomes an abrasive agent that consumes and distorts data slowly.
Looking at the rise of computational power and its frail anatomy, the project points to lost formats to question the longevity of our digital realm. It remembers that all matter is in a cycle in which decay is ultimately at the mercy of time and natural phenomena. Each loop of sound stored in the memory is wiped progressively as the light sneaks upon the crystal, breaking the sound into incomprehensive patterns. Placed in an ensemble of Eproms, Mineral Amnesia creates a sound composition that erodes to the point of silence.
commissioned by: Simultan.org
Technical support: Dorian Largen Schleich
Woodwork: Zumzet Acoustics, Alin Rotariu
assistance in execution: Levente Kozma, Gloria Vreme Moser, Theo Vreme Moser
Ioana Vreme Moser is a sound artist engaged with hardware electronics, speculative research, and tactile experimentation.
In her practice, she uses rough electronic processes to obtain different materialities of sound. She places electronic components and control voltages in different situations of interaction with her body, organic materials, lost and found items, and environmental stimuli. From these collisions, synthesized sounds emerge to carry personal narrations and observations on the history of electronics, their production chains, wastelands, and entanglements in the natural world.
Amongst others, she has performed and exhibited at the National Gallery of Denmark (DK), Fonderie Darling (CA), Akademie der Künste Berlin (DE); Manifesta 14 (XK); SFX – Sound Effects Seoul (KR), Ars Electronica (AT), Bunkier Sztuki Gallery Krakow (PL); Simultan Festival (RO); Eigen+Art Lab – Transmediale, Berlin (DE).