finalized essay

La Persistencia de la Memoria
The experience of time is one of transience, impermanence, and entropy- these are integral aspects of life regardless of culture and historical context. The sharp shifts in my life, the highlight of which was immigration, revealed this to me at a very early age.
Because of this, I have developed a particular interest in fantasy (defined as any mental incarnation which exists outside of the present moment) and its ability to create longing, therefore serving as a strong impetus for action. However, the yearning towards a potential future horizon lends itself to pursuit, while the experience of longing for the past does not. The past is a particularly fertile, yet confusing breeding-ground for fantasy and longing- one that relentlessly calls for an impossible act: the return.
Instead of indulging in that fantasy, I respond by dissecting the experience, studying the preservation of memory through the relification (the creation of relics) of objects and places, as well as the preventative preservation of relationships through communication, particularly the sharing of experiences and objects. I am simultaneously interested in the examination of memory itself and the extent of its ability to create fantastical, romanticized illusions.
In the study of my own longing, I have begun to disassemble objects of personal historical and sentimental value and to investigate my experience doing so. I try to note both the suffering and the moment of disconnect during the destruction process and observe the point at which the object becomes exclusively memory and is therefore subject to the process of romanticizing.
Simultaneously, I have, In my past installations, attempted to recreate these mental abstractions in a physical space, not to test the strength of my memory but to actualize these fantasies, permitting me to contrast them to the experience of the present moment; what I call the banal.
My third, concurrent pursuit has been the simplistic act of illustrating horizons and mountain ranges, imagery closely linked with the ever-present but inaccessible or, at least, the not readily accessible, creating metaphors for the experience of longing.
Finally, I am interested in electronic mediums as an extension of mental space for storing experiences (through video, audio and photography) and the role of current technology such as YouTube and Picasaweb in allowing a more immediate and multisensory experience of others' memories and, therefore, a more expansive understanding of subjective history and longing. Because, while the moment exists as an objective thing, our experience of it does not, and neither is our capturing of it through memory (or the extension of memory: the previously mentioned technology). That is what piqued my interest in collecting videos of sincere joy, communal singing..etc from the internet; because they allow me, in spite of barriers of distance or, perhaps, even language, as close to experiencing others' past as possible and give me the opportunity to observe, among other things, the types of scenarios chosen to be remembered.
The internet serves as more than a medium for the exchange of facts, it is also one for the sharing of these fantasies, creating what I call, with some hesitation, a very rough draft of a universal consciousness- of our thinking, of our memories and of our longing.