Collective memory as a commons — held up only where it is tended, and crumbling to dust everywhere unattended.
A real-time work, computed live and never repeating. It runs continuously; the field is never whole, and never the same twice.
A vast field of crystalline cells. Where attention falls, the cells stand solid and warm; everywhere else they grey, crack, and crumble to dust that sifts away into the dark. Wandering individuals keep their own small patches whole — but attention is finite and the field is endless, so each of them is forever leaving ruin behind it. Where two of them tend the same ground, a taller form rises and holds a while before it, too, crumbles — and these take strange shapes, in colours not yet seen in the world, as if the commons were rehearsing works it has not yet made. You watch a people's memory being selectively kept and mostly forgotten, and feel that no care could have held it all. What survives is not what mattered, but what was tended.
Each wandering point of attention is a small Precipitate — one mind's memory in miniature, the first piece of the series returning here as a character. Individuals hold up the collective, patch by patch, and can never cover the whole. A thread of light precipitates from each into the cells it keeps.
Each raised form has a heartbeat — and each kind beats at a tempo set by its colour: the warm gold slow and steady, the cooler blues and greens quicker, light's frequency become a pulse rate. The structure thumps with its beat, struck so you feel it; and as the form decays the beat weakens with it — memory kept alive only as long as it is held. Beneath them, a murmuring crowd of small voices and an austere open-fifth drone in E♭, the warming third still withheld. Built to play for hours without fatigue.
The Commons is the second piece of the series — What Remains — on the fragility of memory, individual and collective. Where Precipitate is one mind, this is a people: the hard truth that a community cannot hold its own past, and keeps only what it chooses to tend. The series goes on from here through other forms the loss can take — and toward an answer it withholds until the last.
Joshua Borsman makes sculpture, sound, and kinetic work — staged in galleries, gardens, sidewalks, and orbit. The pieces take real processes and signals and turn them into work that unfolds in time and refuses to repeat. joshuaborsman.com
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