"Rehearsal of Memory simultaneously challenges our assumptions of normality and confronts us with a clean comfortable machine, filled with filth, with the forbidden and with the demented, its hygienic procedures contaminated by the effluent of excluded human relations. For a long time we have assigned machines our dirty laundry while maintaining the image of their enamelled white veneers"

"Now is the time for filth"

       Graham Harwood

It is no accident that social control reproduces itself into technological forms. The reduction of information to binary representation leads to a levelling process of data, whether that information be psychological profiles, battle tactics, or credit card details. Here, number crunching produces an image of anonymity through its incomprehension to humans at machine level. We take no responsibility for the way the calculator adds its numbers together and in the same way we take no responsibility for the way data-bases collate information. The binary mechanism can be seen to lead to an emotionally vacant space interpreted through cathode ray tubes and clicking buttons.
In this respect computers as a primary technology can give us a safe distance from difficult decisions: whether they are deciding which patients to treat, which to leave to die, or which employees are surplus to production. Whether we agree or not, the modern machine is currently perceived as a neutral decision making space. This image of anonymity creates a sufficient distance from events to create a situation in which we are ritually free to give up our ability to feel the consequences of our actions.
Rehearsal of Memory challenges our assumptions of normality and at the same time confronts us with a clean comfortable machine filled with filth, the forbidden and the demented, its hygienic procedures contaminated with the effluent of excluded human relations. For a long time we have assigned to machines our dirty laundry whilst maintaining the image of their enamelled white veneers.
Insanity it seems to me never exists except in relation to strong fictions of sanity. Normality is maintained by common sense, a standard by which sanity can be measured. Fictions grow from folk law, fed by the deluge of rhetoric poured out from the technology of Hollywood, the art world and the media. These electric images fill the mental spaces left by our own lack of personal knowledge about the mentally ill individual. This misinformation sentences the mentally ill to be executed, beaten brutally, fined, shamed, incarcerated, drugged, hospitalised, or even treated to heavy doses of tender loving care. But first and foremost they are excluded from passing as normal women or men. They are branded with the image of being a sickness in society. Living specimens of what we are not, positioned within emotional and technological microscopes known as mental hospitals.

Chemical altered states. Surveillance. Forensic Testing. Medical records. You can't argue with it. That's what the computer says.

Think of the kinds of people described above. Are their behaviours truly more harmful than those of people who are normal? In many cases the answer is no. Consider the lawfully wedded husband who physically and mentally assaults his wife, his battered wife; suffers as much as any victim of a convicted rapist or child abuser. Similar things might be said of the sane general whose decision to defend national honour at any price may harm society in a much worse fashion than the actions of any so-called mentally ill person.

L’immagine di quel corpo composito da percorrere col mouse, che porta le esperienze e le vite dei pazienti ad una prossimità non compromettente con il fruitore, è l’interfaccia. Rispetto alla tradizionale esperienza di lettura dei CD-ROM in Rehearsal of Memory il fruitore deve scoprire da sé le porte Ð i link Ð attraverso cui attivare le informazioni, gli viene dunque richiesto un impegno maggiore. Harwood avrebbe potuto scrivere un libro o fare un video su quell’esperienza. Ma con un CD-ROM ipermediale è riuscito a dire qualcosa di linguisticamente ed emotivamente peculiare sul mondo di Ashworth, che con nessun altro mezzo di comunicazione avrebbe potuto esprimere.

...all social structures transfer themselves into the substantial structure of the body and into the consciously performed representation of the body...