ARCHIVE OF LOST THOUGHT works in two parts; First, as a roaming participatory artwork gathering thoughts and creating temporary spaces. Then as a site-specific archive deep in the woods of upstate NY.
The ARCHIVE begins by inviting people in the general public to submit a thought to the ARCHIVE through a short and fun meditative activity.
Asked if they want to submit to the ARCHIVE, participants are given a seat and dark glasses to cover their eyes. A short verbal meditation/tension release relaxation is performed; “Reach into the tub and take as much clay as you’d like. Holding it in your hands, start to play with it. As your mind is quiet, imagine a room.. a room you haven’t been to in a while. What does it smell like, sound like, what is in there, don’t try to make anything. Just move through the clay as you move through the room. When you’re done, just take of the glasses.”
The lost room has been formed.
Rooms create temporary space. Some individual uploaded LOST ROOMS can be found online.
The second part of the ARCHIVE of Lost Thought is the Master ARCHIVE being built at B-home projects in Catskill, New York. A Waddle and Daub mud hut with pit kiln is presently in production. This structure houses the Lost Rooms in physical space where the viewer can sit in the center of the room of rooms.
Utilizes our oldest reproducible recording device of clay, The Archive of Lost Thought; Lost Rooms intents to question the incessant taxonomy of thought and dependence on traceability of information. Likewise it questions the unwarranted trust in digital authority growing in our binary culture. Acting as anti-archive, the ARCHIVE attempts to provide a recording of a feeling connected to space via memory. Even when unspeakable, it is still transferable in the most primal of imprints. At the same time, the ARCHIVE addresses our need to be recorded and saved. By allowing the ARCHIVE to be nebulous it comments on the subjectivity of archives in general. Simultaneously, it provides a magical space created out of actual transference of these truer than true recordings. As with memory, when we replay it, we actually relive it, each object includes within them the feeling of that very moment that is passed through every cilia and cell of ones hands as the remembrance washes through the very place of experience.
Carrie Dashow 