Hyper-memory for Amplified Ensemble & Electronics (2023)

Hyper-memory is inspired by the warped perceptions of memory and time that occur in Hyperreal cyberspaces. The piece playfully and absurdly explores the ways in which digital memories move through the saturated and frenetic excess of the Internet and electronic devices. Hyper-memory sonically imagines a cybernetically mutated digital fragment of the past that has taken on a ghost-like life of its own. A digital memory — reducible to a file, a link, or a "you have a new memory" notification — can take on an uncanny quality, suggestive of an illusory autonomy; its continuous existence as a constantly-changing entity unfolds in a ceaseless state of re-contextualization. Hyper-memory repurposes sampled fragments of Ruth Lowe's 1940 I'll Never Smile Again, a song about memory, longing, and nostalgia. Here, the recording functions as a kernel of memory that moves through digital devices and virtual spheres, becoming decontextualized, warped, disfigured, chopped, stretched, and unraveled.