Kennedy Browne at Lunch Bytes event, Irish Museum of Modern Art

Goethe Institut + IMMA | Lunch Bytes - Life + Memory

Fri­day 21 November 2014, 1 - 2.30pm, Lecture Room, IMMA

Session 4 - Life: Memory

What happens to our capacity to remember – and the role of memory in everyday life – when our experiences and interactions are increasingly taking place on various web-based social platforms, mediated through our smart phones that constantly record and distribute images, comments, videos and recommendations relating to what we see, feel, hear and think? Digital devices are built to archive and organize the details of our ordinary lives – from the most intimate to the casually impersonal – and employ ever more sophisticated technologies to do so, moving from hardwired memory to the ethereal cloud. How have these technologies affected our individual and collective forms of recollection and commemoration? What position does the past have in relation to what some have called our ‘expanded present’? How does this inform the way we imagine our future? And what is the relation between our embodied memory and the mnemonic objects we use to augment and communicate our experiences? Moreover, this discussion looks at the mnemonic practices of the museum and considers how new technologies have impacted the way its collection is treated.

This edition of Lunch Bytes asks artists and experts to reflect on such questions, focusing in particular on the ways in which artistic practices have explored the aesthetics of contemporary memory practices. Additionally, it asks what we might gain from conceiving art as itself an assemblage of mnemonic objects and practices.

Artists and experts:
Erica Scourti, artist, London
Gareth Kennedy and Sarah Browne (Kennedy Browne), artist duo, Ireland
Christina Kennedy, Head of Collections, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin


LUNCH BYTES – THINKING ABOUT ART AND DIGITAL CULTURE is a series of discussion with leading artists and scholars on art and digital culture to take place across Europe throughout 2014. The project will culminate in an international symposium to be held in Berlin in 2015.

The series is curated by Melanie Bühler and Sophie Byrne.

Booking is essential. Free tickets are available online here.