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Arnold Dreyblatt: “The Wunderblock”, 2000 (table from mdf with internally mounted tft-display and computer, chair)
About this art instllation:
“In 1925, Freud wrote a text that compares the faculty of memory to a child’s toy known as a Wunderblock. It consists of a wax slab stretched with cellophane, upon which a text may be inscribed, and just as readily erased by lifting the cellophane layer up and away from the wax slab. In contrast to Freud’s model, in which the pressure of the act of inscription onto the cellophane surface continues in the direction of the underlying layer of wax, in „The Wunderblock, the original selection and entry of data has been concluded in the past. The movement originates from ROM and is held in RAM, before travelling up towards the surface. Quite independently of our own states of presence or absence, the installation searches and inscribes autonomously. One has the impression that the underlying textual sources can never be perceived in their entirety. Because the many texts fragments are inscribed and erased simultaneously, one can read a given fragment only with difficulty before it vanishes. The model of memory demonstrated here is at once highly unstable, fragmentary, incomplete, perishable and ephemeral. The sentence fragments appearing and disappearing on the screen describe a process of finding and loss, safeguarding and destruction.” (more)
About Arnold Dreyblatt:
“Arnold Dreyblatt (b. New York City, 1953) is an American composer and visual artist. He studied music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier and media art with Steina and Woody Vasulka. He has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. In 2007, he was elected to the German Academy of Art (Akademie der Künste, Berlin).” (Wikipedia)
“A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’” is a very short text written by Freud in 1925 and first published in German the same year (PDF).
This text is the subject of an essay by Jacques Derrida first published in 1967 as part of the volume Writing and Difference (Google books preview, Amazon). It was translated to English in 1972 and published in the Yale French Studies (no 48, pp. 74-117; PDF available upon subscription to JSTOR).
