Not yet published

Taken as an ideal, the function of the library is to act as a kind of collective mind. Much like information is retained and filed away in applicable zones of the brain during sleep, so too does the library collect and archive language, data, ephemera, and individual and collective histories – preserving these artefacts in relevant catalogues until we need to draw upon them again. 

But this institutionalised, synthesised brain suffers from similar fallacies to its biological counterpart; things are misplaced, misnomered, or missed entirely. It is here in the unknown – the dark matter, sitting between the structure of the archive – that new connections occur. What generative potential rests in image fragments, incomplete records, partially told stories?

Edited by Kate Rhodes and Rory Hyde, and published alongside a major exhibition at State Library Victoria, You Have a New Memory explores the creative possibilities of memory loss in the library. Tracing a path through the State Library’s 4.5 million collection items, this book unearths images that ask us to reexamine how a library remembers, and how our own thoughts interact with the memories of others. 

This publication – along with its corresponding exhibition – evokes the slideshow format: once a hallmark of the pre-digital era as an occasion for family and friends to reminisce through photography, slideshows often appear on our phones today too; an algorithm pings You have a new memory, followed by a succession of photographs. In You Have a New Memory, ordinarily disparate images – street parties, infrastructure, medieval texts, family portraits, group hypnosis, fashion shows – flash and converge; hundreds of memories flickering amongst a collection of millions. Images and text move beside one another without fully aligning, creating unexpected connections and meanings. Amidst the cacophony, there are images that summon narratives about a library as both idea and institution. Scenes of shelves, boxes, server racks, and staff remind us that accessing memory frequently depends on acts of curiosity, organisation, preservation, and care. Here too, is the unwritten, the living memory; songlines, ceremony, culture.

Co-published by Perimeter Editions and State Library Victoria, and designed by Stuart Geddes and Žiga Testen, You Have a New Memory is an invitation to wander through the architecture of the collective mind, thinking with memories from the past and pointing them towards the future.

304 pages, 21.5 x 17 cm, softcover
Published by Perimeter Editions x State Library Victoria
ISBN: 9781922545725