Roseware
As a first post I want to stay inside the kitchen of Constant. I’m really fascinated by Roseware, an installation by Chris Marker and Laurence Rassel which was co-produced by Constant. It was exhibited at the end of the nineties in amongst others the Museum for Fine Arts in Brussels, Fondacio Antonio Tapies in Barcelona, Centro de Arte Contemporaneo in Sevilla and the Video and Media Art festival in Bonn.
What?
Roseware expanded the idea of Imemmory, another cd-rom by Chris Marker in which he was guided by the idea to trace his immemmory that was constituted by images of different sources and multiple supports. The spectator had the possibility to read and write at the same time, because it was the spectator who chose the order of the sequences in the structure designed by the author. The concept of immemory was that of a memory structured by relations amongst images and sounds. Roseware is conceptualised as an empty book in which everyone has the possibility to write a chapter. Lodged into a computer, its use is fairly simple: every visitor brings along a series of documents that constitute a fragment of his personal memory: music, pictures, drawings, video.
By the usage of a camera, a micro, a cd-reader, the info could be inserted very easily into the computer and linked up to each other using the installed software. In a few hours of manipulation, anyone could dispose in the mobile and open memory of Roseware, a little part of his or her intimacy. Gradually new documents are introduced into this structure and formed a sort of eternal network of memories and impressions of a public.
In constant progression, Roseware was saved on a series of hard drives that could easily be transported from one machine into the other all over the world. So everyone composed onto the computer, with the assistance of a guide, a chapter of this collective memory. One of the conditions for Roseware to be installed into a museum was that there always was someone there to help and instruct the spectators – producers.