Animus Mneme

Animus Mneme, Mixed-media installation, dimensions variable
As part of the exhibition 74 million million million tons at SculptureCenter

Animus Mneme is a project that contemplates the hybridity and elasticity of ancient and contemporary memory. Through looking at historic and futuristic forms, the project visualizes the intersection of premodern animist thought, such as the Antikythera mechanism, the alleged first computer, and a modernist envisioning of memory embodied in the Terasem Transhumanist movement. Based on the fictional Earthseed religion from Octavia Butler’s novels, the Terasem movement attempts to shape and conjure God through technological means.

The project builds upon certain anthropological assumptions, such as the belief that human cognitive adaptations integrated concepts of self from the Upper Paleolithic era (beginning about 40,000 years ago) forward; and that these cognitive adaptations were linked to shamanism; and later, in turn led to the development of symbolic thinking and mythopoetic cosmology. Through considering this myth making lineage, these interventions and forms consider how an interweaving of contemporary narratives from entertainment and science fiction speculate as much as inform and shape the future.

So, in a consideration of the liminal space between the natural and cultural, real and imagined, subjects and objects, past and present, an evolution of spirituality is contoured through a hybrid approach that merges the animistic and rational. From this entangled perspective, artifacts and sites seemingly comingle and perform a transference of memory from one to the other.