The eighth Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition “Living Togetherness,” presented by Hong-gah Museum, features the video artwork “Memoria” created collaboratively by Steffen Köhn from Germany and Nestor Siré from Cuba, utilizing the text of “Johnny Mnemonic.” This novel was previously adapted by the original author into the screenplay for the movie “Johnny Mnemonic,” with little deviation in plot. The video also incorporates imagery controlled by the Cuban government, intertwining the dystopian background of the work with Cuba’s political and social context.
Analysis of “Memoria”
The screen arrangement of this video artwork is quite unique: in the center of the exhibition space are two office chairs that can be freely slid and rotated. On the left side upon entering the room is a single-screen display, while in the opposite corner, there is a three-screen installation comprising a total of four screens. The content between these four screens corresponds to each other, and the central chairs allow viewers to instantly turn around and view the images behind them, switching back and forth. Hanging from the ceiling is a mainframe emitting colorful light.
The narrative of the video is highly dramatic: like the novel, the protagonist is Johnny, who serves as a “memory courier” tasked with storing data in his brain for clients and retrieving it upon arrival at their destination. Johnny does not know the content of the information. In the original story, Johnny receives an enormous overload of information from a Japanese client, which turns out to be the cure for a deadly epidemic at the time, putting his life in danger. However, in the video, the content Johnny carries changes — from the cure to a massive collection of pirated movies.
However, this also leads to Johnny being pursued by others. Similar to the movie, Johnny seeks out a street doctor named “Spider” to help him extract the information from his brain, or else his brain will not be able to support him. Later, Johnny wanders the streets and coincidentally meets a woman willing to act as his bodyguard, presumably modeled after Jane. Subsequently, a confrontation unfolds between the woman and the men chasing Johnny. In the end, Johnny’s memories still fragment, and at this moment, he encounters a dolphin.
As an embodiment of the ocean, the internet, and everything, the dolphin tells Johnny, “We will set you free. You can choose a memory to accompany you for life, something humans can’t always have.” Faced with this invitation, Johnny cries out, “But I have nothing in my mind! I can’t remember anything!”
The dolphin embodies the core concept of this work. Without memories, is Johnny still himself? Is Johnny himself because of his physical body, or because of his memories? As a memory courier, he carries a lot of information, travels far and wide, and even faces pursuit, but in the end, his mind is left blank. The irony is stark: the self who once carried a vast amount of information contrasted with the self who can’t even provide “a single memory” now.
This video installation starts from a dystopian speculative world. While it appropriates existing texts, it integrates with the nationality of the artists and incorporates elements such as pirated movies, daring jump cuts, and color experiments in the visual style, incorporating many millennium animated film clips. The viewing method of the four channels is also refreshing. When Johnny appears alone on the single screen or converses with Spider or the dolphin, the audience can choose their viewing angle, editing the images with their own eyes in real time. Although the main screen area has three channels, it is well coordinated. In the fleeing scenes, the interchange of viewpoints between Johnny on the street and the female bodyguard in the car fully conveys a sense of speed and excitement. Additionally, the screens occasionally merge the three interconnected screens into one, making the fight scenes extremely engaging.
A Future from the Past
The original novel of “Memoria,” titled “Johnny Mnemonic,” was written in 1981, envisioning the plot in the fictional future of 2021. When the video art exhibition was showcased, it was already in the year 2024. Such cautionary tales depicting the future from the past, reinterpreted and reproduced, have become increasingly common in recent times.
In the contemporary art field, there is “Future Shock”(未來的衝擊) created by Su Hui-yu(蘇匯宇) in 2019, which selected the same-named novel written in 1970 as its source material. The protagonist, as the last human on earth, embarks on a journey on the road. This work, besides being exhibited in art galleries, was also re-edited into a feature film a few years later, which premiered at film festivals.
In addition, in the realm of animation, there’s a chapter titled “The Greatest Robot on Earth,”(地上最大機器人) adapted from Osamu Tezuka’s(手塚治虫) 1964 manga “Astro Boy,”(原子小金剛) which was serialized as “PLUTO” by Naoki Urasawa(浦澤直樹) and released as a TV series with the same name in 2023. In an era where robots and humans coexist, there are individuals targeting the seven most outstanding robots.
Tezuka’s original work is not as complex as Urasawa’s version, instead focusing on clear-cut good versus evil, telling the story of a wealthy man’s ambitions and the joyful ending of his thwarted plans. Urasawa elevates the original setting, delving into themes of race, nation, and the animosity between humans and robots.
It’s worth noting that “PLUTO” also features the concept of memory chips, where robots only need to extract and link the chips to obtain all the memories of another robot. This aligns with the utopian future depicted in “Johnny Mnemonic.”
Treasure Trove
“The Greatest Robot on Earth” was illustrated in 1964; “Impact of the Future” was written in 1970; “Johnny Mnemonic” was originally penned in 1981. People of the 20th century, envisioning the world after the millennium, are like the wonderful inventions in Doraemon’s treasure trove. High technology hides in the infinitely spacious bag, where one never knows if the next item pulled out will be a memory-toast for cheating or a terrifying weapon of mass destruction.
Human anticipation and speculation about the future have never ceased, especially after the appearance of humanoid robots. Caught between timidity and excitement, humans inevitably harbor innate hostility towards them. Astro Boy, as one of the seven great robots in the world, is a world-saving hero, an absolute good guy; “Oliver,” the fictional new-type human butler in “Impact of the Future,” can handle life’s trivialities for people, even delivering gifts for festive occasions on time; the memory courier in “Memoria” carries national secrets but doesn’t even know who he is.
Doraemon carries a treasure trove, yet he is merely a vessel, a conduit, not the owner of these inventions. Similar to the contents of Doraemon’s pouch, whether it’s pirated movies or the antidote to save the world, the “images” are deeply hidden within it, and Johnny carries these images without truly owning them. This phenomenon can actually be applied to any modern individual. We pick up our phones, load up on social media, in the vast sea of information, data makes thinking redundant, and people’s cognition gradually flattens, focusing only on appearances. Isn’t this flattening of data phenomenon akin to the lament of the memory courier?
Unbeknownst to us, we have become carriers of big data, yet we have never truly obtained these data. Even under the guise of data manipulation, we mistakenly believe that we are thinking. Degraded minds have become containers for carrying other people’s memories — ultimately, like Johnny, when faced with the dolphin’s invitation, we cannot even say who we are. In the vast sea of data, we cannot find a memory that belongs to us. Describing it this way in 2024 might seem exaggerated, but from the recent developments in AI intelligence, this future doesn’t seem too distant.
Conclusion
The discussion about robots, androids, cyborgs, and other post-human entities has been a hot topic, whether in the 20th or 21st century. We are eager to place “humans” and “machines” within acceptable definitions, hoping to avoid facing the next invention that emerges from the cornucopia. However, reality is not as clear-cut as in “Astro Boy,” where good and evil are binary, and world peace can be achieved by defeating the ultimate villain. Before making value judgments, it’s essential to establish who “oneself” is, and where they come from. If Johnny has no memories of his own, is he still Johnny? Or just a body that can be swapped out at will?
Before the turn of the millennium, inventions like Doraemon’s gadgets and speculations about humanity’s future, as seen in “Johnny Mnemonic,” sprouted like mushrooms. Today, in 2024, humanity must admire these fables and collectively pick up these past “futures” for reexamination, packaging them into a modern-day virtual science fiction world that resonates with contemporary audiences. Works like “Astro Boy” and “The Impact of the Future” in comics or literature form, more or less forecast the absurdities of contemporary technological development and the foreseeable conflicts and social divides. “Memoria,” transformed into a video installation, focuses on the interaction between images and society, reflecting on Cuban history, technological debates, and the essence of humanity.
(This essay was originally written in Chinese, the English version is translated by GPT-3.5. )
