The Inverted Cone

The Inverted Cone is a new installation, premiering at transmediale.10, which uses a constellation of projection devices to create a condition of atemporality, where our memories of the past, and our experience of the present, collide. In this installation, digital and analogue images, pass through the same lens. What we see is not a video, nor a still, but a kind of disorientating electronic composite. The combination of temporally discrete visual sources provokes, in the viewer, an awareness of the historical continuum of image-making.

The work refers to the famous metaphor of the “memory cone”, described by Henri Bergson in his book Matter and Memory. Bergson explains that the base of the “memory cone” represents the entire collection of memories of our lived past, whilst the peak of the cone is our present condition, and our memory of the past at the time we interact with the world. At the heart of Maire’s installation is an ‘inverted light cone’, which is a literal translation of Bergson’s metaphor into an actual optical process. When participating in the heuristic process of engaging with this work, the viewer automatically becomes a media-archeologist, experiencing distinct chronologies simultaneously.

The Inverted Cone is a new iteration of Julien Maire’s memory station series of works.
It was developed during a DOCK-Workstation residency, produced by DOCK Berlin e.V., supported by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds.