Memoryscopes ― Remnants, Forensics, Aesthetics

Ross Gibson moves between scholarly and artistic worlds, writing about cultural objects and ideas, making multimedia works, films, poetry, curating in museum spaces and creating installations, amongst other pursuits. Memoryscopes arrives after decades of Gibson's creating and analysing artworks built from traces that history has left lying around in archives, in landscapes, in objects, in peoples' bodies, in biographies and family histories. This book is an examination of some particular modes of remembrance. Memoryscopes examines how the past has dynamism too, how it is a force always pushing and skewing the present. Gibson contends that this historical dynamism can be identified and dramatized aesthetically in ways that activate clues found in archives, artefacts, landscapes, middens and collections; clues primed in some way for an imaginatively forensic treatment. These memoryscopes are aesthetic forms already created or that we might have to invent in order to contain, focus and direct the forces of the past. Memoryscopes is a companion volume to Changescapes.