Carl Diehl

Cracked Memex

2008

Video Installation

The Cracked Memex was inspired by the well-known innovation of Dr. Vannevar Bush. The marvelous “memory extender,” born obsolete, never made it past vaporware. Truly, it inspired hypertext but remained too unwieldy to be realized in the 1940s tech-scene. A mechanical monstrosity, a premature arrival of the future.

This Metaphortean variant, a desk retrofit with audio patchbay and offering, at times, suggestive correspondence with concurrent flows of images.

Audiovisual feeds are interchangeable, but the first incarnation was aimed at ideas of techno-utopia, offworld agriculture and obsolete astronomies.

The Cracked Memex is cracked as much for affiliations with crack-pottery and crankdom as any allusions to bent electronics. Vannevar Bush was also a member of the once secret Majestic 12, a committee researching E.T. wreckage associated with Roswell. This memex extends the mental capacities of the conspiratorial thinker. A cybernetic device, it augments the internal mechanics of conspiracy logic, activating an interface of malfunction within the human mind.