To access the geolocative audio, aim the camera of your mobile device at this QR code.

Το έργο παρουσιάζεται από το Artist Residency Program του School of Environmental Sciences, University of Guelph.

Χρησιμοποιώντας το γεωεντοπισμό, αυτό το site-specific έργο εντοπίζει ηχητικά τον αρχαίο ποταμό Ιλισό, κάτω από την πόλη της Αθήνας. Η πρόσβαση στο έργο μπορεί να γίνει μέσω μιας εφαρμογής που ονομάζεται Echoes, από οποιονδήποτε έχει κινητή συσκευή σε μια συγκεκριμένη φυσική τοποθεσία, που βρίσκεται στους Χάρτες Google.

This work speaks to the importance of locations where contemplation is possible, allowing ideas to flourish in serenity. Without access to such environments, the seedlings of thought are forgotten, lost to interruption and distraction.

In Athens, a buried river is traced using GPS in an application called Echoes that uses Google Maps to play audio along its length. Presented at Platforms Art Fair, curated by Julie René de Cotret, Mnemonic Fish draws upon two of the five mythical rivers of the underworld of Hades, The River of Unmindfulness, known as Lethe, where the dead drink from its waters to forget their previous lives before rebirth, and The River of Memory, known as Mnemosyne. To drink from the pools of Mnemosyne would restore memory and spare the soul from transmigration. The actual underground river, River Ilissos, is an ancient river that runs through Athens that was buried in a tunnel beneath the city of WWII in an effort to modernize the city.  The ancient banks of River Ilisos were written about by Plato, where Socrates and the Cynics would teach their philosophies.

The goddess Mnemosyne was the daughter of Uranus and Gaea, Heaven and Earth, and the mother of the nine muses, all fathered by her nephew Zeus. It is said that although Plato used myth as a teaching tool rather than a belief system, he was known to call upon Mnemosyne to remember his narratives, as the titan’s importance was understood by a society built upon oral culture:  

“But besides the gods and goddesses whom you have mentioned, I would specially invoke Mnemosyne (Memory); for all the important part of my discourse is dependent on her favour, and if I can recollect and recite enough of what was said by the priests and brought hither by Solon, I doubt not that I shall satisfy the requirements of this theatre.
-Plato, Critias (trans. Bury)

Arguably the oppositional counterpart of Mnemosyne was Lethe, the goddess of Oblivion, daughter of Eris, Goddess of Strife, who was described as dull, inhabiting the role of guard to the court of Hypnos, where the River of Unmindfulness encircled. Though the mythological rivers are said to be located at the archeological site of Eleusis, where the cult of Demeter and Persephone performed the ceremonies of the Eleusinian Mysteries, I am using the metaphoric and formal aspects of forgotten rivers buried underground as thematics within Mnemonic Fish. Furthermore, the fishes referenced in the title are a reference to another geographically displaced poetic, in which thought and the inception of ideas are like fish that swim away when disrupted, as Virginia Woolf had described in A Room of One’s Own. 

“Thought – to call it by a prouder name than it deserved – had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until – you know the little tug – the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass, how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating.

But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind – put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man's figure rose to intercept me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a beadle, I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the fellows and scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path, the arms of the beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the fellows and scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that, in protection of their turf, they had sent my little fish into hiding.”

In the mediated confluence of references of Mnemonic Fish, such as the rivers, fact and myth, temporalities, and literary source material, I think of Aby Warburg’s interconnected collection of media in his work, fittingly named Mnemosyne. Giorgio Agamben looks closely at binding structures as methodologies in his text, The Signature of All Things, in which he explicitly asks, “What is a Paradigm?” Agamben uses Warburg’s “atlas of images” as an example of a paradigmatic structure that tethers the general and particular to a discernible whole. Warburg’s work, Mnemosyne, which bears the name of the Greek goddess of memory, is a culmination of assorted reproductions of historical art that he collected throughout 1924 to 1929 from newspapers, photographic, and manuscript sources. Warburg named the thematic process of selection, collecting, and placement as Pathosformeln, a form for pathos, which Agamben defines as “...an indissoluble intertwining of an emotional charge and an iconographic formula in which it is impossible to distinguish between form and content...”. Agamben posits that to see Mnemosyne, we must consider its singular elements in contiguity with each other and the whole. The images point to their historical origins, yet exist outside of it, as they are photographed, repurposed, and re-contextualized through placement, becoming neither archaic nor contemporary, “but are undecidable in regards to diachrony and synchrony, unicity and multiplicity.”

In Aby’s configuration of the images, the references are simultaneously recognizable yet inhabit unfamiliar relational territory. The paradigm functions as a constellation to navigate the culmination of images, a relational movement that creates a third kind of knowing by the way the content rubs up against each other.

“In the paradigm, intelligibility does not precede the phenomenon; it stands, so to speak, "beside" it (para)”. The paradigm does not function in a dichotomy but rather, Agamben explains, as analogy. Analogy creates an imbalance in the equation of dichotomy, transforming it by implementing variance in the oscillation of polar forces. Analogy as a term becomes interchangeable with paradigm in Agamben’s text, a perspective that maintains a tertium datur, “neither A or B”. It is not, in the case of Warburg’s atlas of images, the singular or the whole, but is the movement through particular to particular, particular to whole, and whole to particular, in which we find the ‘analogical third’.

The River Ilissos is “seen” in an almost synaesthetic sense through sound that speaks of Woolf’s fish in an audio composition, folding and unfolding as though remembered and forgotten, buried and emerging, as environmental sounds of river currents and ambient abstraction are heard. The audio is available via Echoes on participants' mobile devices as they walk along the river below Athens. Here, the digital palimpsest is sonic, temporal, and spatial, as though written in between memory and oblivion.