Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

This talk explores the potential of ephemerals through artworks that make things disappear. New media, like the computer technology on which it relies, races simultaneously towards the future and the past, towards the bleeding edge of obsolescence. The slipperiness of new media—the difficulty of engaging it in the present—is linked to the speed of its dissemination. Also key to the digital as the new is a rhetorical conflation of memory and storage. Memory, with its constant degeneration, does not equal storage; although artificial memory has historically combined the transitory with the permanent, the passing with the stable, digital media complicates this relationship by making the permanent into an enduring ephemeral.

In a Glass Hour is a series devoted to exploring the topic of time from the diverse perspectives of media theorists, scientists, artists, historians, journalists and others. Taking a broadly interdisciplinary approach to this singular subject, the series will point to the elasticity of this pervasive topic.