Screen Memories (2023) Statement
[*This is an accompaniment to Screen Memories (2023), written by the filmmaker, Nick Vyssotsky]
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Screen Memories is a cycle of nine video works created between 2021 and 2023. It primarily concerns content encountered on social media platforms and the physiological effects of experiencing life through technologically mediated systems. While not explicitly simulating the aesthetics of social media platforms, it attempts to emulate the ebb and flow of a user in the act of doom scrolling.
The first video in the cycle, La La La La La (Inside An Empty Room My Inspiration Flows), consists of a procession of images set in time to a Nightcore remix of the song ‘Around The World (La La La La La)’ by ATC. The images used are sourced from various social media platforms which offer users access to an archive of content ‘liked’ by themselves, the video thus acting as a document of content liked by the artist over the course of the last ten years.
Each subsequent segment in the cycle was made in response to the base format established by La La La La La, that being images or videos appropriated from social media or other online sources cut in time to a piece of music.
The second video in the cycle, Time Of Your Life (Still Frames In Your Mind) makes use of a song with a much slower tempo such that the images proceed at a slower rate but are still chosen and ordered at random. The third piece, (Cobwebs Spun Back & Forth In The Sky) is the first piece to implement video rather than images, still sourced from the artist’s archive of liked social media content. Over The Rainbow, the fourth segment, consists of a single six minute clip. Over the course of the first half of Screen Memories there is an interest in requiring the audience to maintain attention as each segment makes use of longer and longer pieces of content.
The fifth segment, Careful What You Wish For (Nowhere Zone) returns to a cadence similar to that of La La La La La but interchanges video clips with still images. This segment solely makes use of video and images captured by the artist rather than making use of found media and is the only piece to do so. The following work, 2011-1234 (noided) does not make use of content taken from social media or content made by the artist but is rather a rapid succession of some of the image files extracted from the many hard drives recovered during the raid on Osama Bin-Laden’s Abbotobad compound in 2011.
2011-1234 (noided) is followed by Pack Up Every Piece, a piece that echoes (Cobwebs…) but consists solely of footage of violent, erratic or irrational behavior. Similarly, Flag Is Raised returns to the rapid staccato of still images seen in La La La La La but with a focus, while sometimes digressing, on content related to expressions of transhumanism in fields such as religion, the intelligence community, ufology, occultism, and military technology.
The final segment of the cycle, Hymn, consists of video captured in VRchat depicting a user having a seizure while the people surrounding him attempt to comfort him despite being physically distant from him. Of all the segments of Screen Memories this part of the cycle feels the most optimistic as it shows people attempting to help one another despite being physically dislocated and only able to interact through mediated space.
‘Screen Memories’ as a term originates with Sigmund Freud, who employed it as a means of describing the occurrence of distorted or false recollections meant to obfuscate an unpleasant or traumatic event from a person’s memory. In the 1980s and 90s ‘Screen Memories’ were appropriated by researchers of Satanic Ritual Abuse and Alien Abduction to explain the false memories supposedly implanted in experiencers to obscure their actual memories of either phenomenon.
In this project, the concept of Screen Memories is applied to contemporary networked life, where the “screen” is no longer simply a metaphor for psychic substitution, but also a literal surface mediating the majority of human interaction. The personal archive assembled here (images, videos, evidence, fragments of online culture) serves as a sedimentary record of a decade plus of mediated looking. Yet, when removed from their original chronological order and recomposed into rhythmic sequences set against music, these fragments lose their evidentiary value and begin to function less as documentation and more as constructed memories.
Unlike Freud’s model of the screen memory as a benign veil over the unpleasant, much of the material here is itself disquieting, often depicting humanity’s closeness to conflict, technological acceleration, environmental fragility, and acts of public or intimate violence. The sedative function of the screen is complicated by this tension: the content’s traumatic potential is blunted not by replacement with something superficial, but by the physiological and spatial remove at which it is encountered. Trauma becomes consumable when held at arm’s length, its impact mediated by the glow of a device and the passivity of scrolling.
Just as the SRA and alien abduction narratives of the late 20th century positioned Screen Memories as deliberate obfuscations planted by an external agent, here too memory is corrupted by the algorithms and platform architectures of surveillance capitalism as well as the compulsions of self-curation, and the artist’s own process of selection. What emerges is a form of implanted or synthetic memory authored collaboratively by the user, the platform, and the cultural logic of the feed. Memories that may be rooted in real-world events are experienced as aestheticized, dislocated visions.
Nick Vyssotsky
1/6/25