STUK en Groep T produceerden voor deze tentoonstellling een nieuw werk van Julien Maire. Memory Cone hanteert de principes van focus en selectie in beelden.

"The inverted cone" is a metaphor used in the book "Matters and memory” from Henry Bergson: it's a simple drawing: an inverted cone whose summit is inserted into a plane. The plane "plane P" as Bergson calls it is the plane of "my actual representation of the universe”. The cone can be described as different levels of memory and experiences focused on one point. When we move in the present time of our conscience it is the summit of the cone. This installation is an almost 1 to 1 transposition of the concept of Bergson into an optical process.

Slide pictures, bought on a flee market since ten years (collection of Sebastien Koeppel), have been used as basic memory material for the first presentation at the Artefact Festival in. Anonymous photographers, family pictures or industrial pedagogic slides are projected with a slide projector. Rather then enlarging the image on a screen, the still image is reduced by lenses and is concentrated on a "Digital mirror". DMD's (Digital Micro-Mirror Device) are often used in video projectors, they perform the "digital light processing” or DLP developed by Texas Instruments.

The installation, uses a disassembled video projector, the micro mirror devise has been taken out from the video beamer and receives the reduced slide projection directly. The video beamer is connected to a camera that films the hand of the performer who organizes some simple pieces of papers (white or gray). Each paper opens a window in the projection (the white color triggers the micro mirror that projects part of the photographic picture on the screen: the spectator sees a portion of the photographic image through the video projection.

The performer chooses some details simply by moving the pieces of paper on a table. He discovers and reconfigures slowly a global memory or performs a selective remembrance of a moment. Some pictures are trivial, others contain a large amount of information. Old and new media are mixed in one shot: a projection of a moving plane (the video) is directly confronted with a still, there are two very different layers and they continue to carry their own visual basic properties. The system produces a very particular composite image that has nothing to do with a digital processing of a picture through a computer.

The system works with all kind of positive film material, 35 mm, 8, or 16 mm film as well as all kinds of still pictures.

- Julien Maire -