The present work aims to articulate about the concepts of memory and déjà vu presented in Peter Krapp’s seminar, held in May 2018 in partnership with Communication Sciences Post-degree Program from UNISINOS and authors from the research line in order to understand the relationship between simultaneity and the midst of digital games. During the event, the following question was raised: would simultaneity means virtuality of an memory that is updated in games?
Starting from the idea that déjà vu becomes a element of technoculture, this repetition turns out to be a feature of gaming machines that prepares us to use them in various forms. For Krapp, déjà vu are “like dreams, which are universal and not pathological as such, déjà vu needs no cure, but allows access to structures of condensation, deformation, displacement, and their potentially pathogenic effects”. If we dismantle a game and look at its frames, with the intention of approaching its structure, it is possible to identify a simultaneity that crosses this arrangement of layers. We could risk defining as a simultaneity of time.
The conundrum of time is that its subjective experience differs from its objective measurement. Although science knows infinity, it does not know the absolute absence of time that would be eternity or timelessness. Yet involuntary recollection is a permanent or timeless possibility: it can occur at any moment without a given date or temporal index fixing its occurrence. Furthermore, the contents of this recollection return from latency as if in their original state, not aged or withered in proportion to the duration of their absence from consciousness. (KRAPP, 2004, p. xx)
Simultaneous objects doesn’t necessarily have to be a sequence, due to that space is no longer dependent on time. But what object lasts in this time / space? Taking a deeper step from Bergson, the simultaneous virtual multiplicities would be our own duration, which is constituted as a “virtual coexistence of all degrees in one and at the same time”(DELEUZE, 1999, 68). Therefore, we can have here a simultaneity of the fluxes from the movement that generate the own frames and layers of the object acting in the space. If we treat simultaneity in this way, it can be defined as a psychological temporality from the idea that duration will exist for a consciousness. In other words, we can’t treat this as simultaneity without having the presence of a conscious being, considering that our own duration is that it makes simultaneous operator / machine flows, just as we can’t assume the existence of multiple and non-simultaneous times provide phenomena that escape both perception and imagination.
Simultaneity is a virtuality, a way of being (BERGSON, 2006). We are talking about thinking of a simultaneity that crosses each frame and not in a linear temporality. The mode of being is a virtual object, and the way of acting is what actualizes. If we take the game frames, for example, and brings them closer to the relation “memory and screen”, there is a potential, finding what Krapp brings in his work “Déjà vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory”, which is the subject of the respective seminar. We can find a construction with these layers that are crossed by a simultaneity of time, bringing all these times together when updates itself, a place where memory could be constructed from this simultaneity.
The investigation of déjà vu can neither pivot around Kittler’s coincidence nor around Weinrich’s performative contradiction; here, the forgotten will never have taken place, while forgetting remains operative. Forgetting as forgetting cannot escape the self-application in which it loses itself, and therefore its phenomenality is a mere trace. A memory of forgetting remains, irreversibly, a paradoxical recovery: here the originary lapse only shows itself as a lapse into origins. What remains is a screen memory. (KRAPP, 2004, p. xiii)
The question about games (frames), memory and screen is quite powerful. Memory builds itself up or does something else. Does it create? Does it assemble something? Using the concept of memory by Henri Bergson, duration is memory: it is continuity, just as there is a continuity between the past and the present — the past lasts / survives the present that it has already been; but the idea of the present is linked to the usefulness of practical life, and can’t exist without a remembrance. From this idea, if we have all the frames and the current frame, we can visualize all the frames passing together. But the previous frame is already an update of the other, like an onion, in layers. To better understand this onion metaphor, we will use the following explanation: the onion bark can act like a memory because it is made up of layers until its end. This memory contains layers where a frame is an update of the previous frame, and with that it becomes the memory of all other frames. Thus observed as a progress or accumulation of the past over the present (a reverberation of the layers that form this onion), we find a simultaneous element that is not only spatial but also temporal including the past. The player updates the game’s virtualities, and this action changes the state of the game.
Memory is not simply the storage of data, and cultural difference and historical change in a media society are therefore not so much a matter of new media versus old as a challenge to the sheer capacity of storage; thus the question is how the function of memory itself is changed. (KRAPP, 2004, p. xxi)
In the frames of the digital games, building a different temporality in each image is an expansion of “now” (BENJAMIN, 1989), bringing in each picture a time with several other times. Could we say that memory is a kind of repetition of simultaneity? As an attempt, it is possible to think of simultaneity as a power that characterizes the nature of a game. In this way, we perceive how frames and assemblies participate in the creation of each frame, with the purpose of creating recognizable technical environments where we move and act (within the logic of possibilities of the computer, in the game form), and this simultaneity power that make up our way of interacting with these objects becomes remarkable.
References
BENJAMIN, W. Magia e técnica, arte e política. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1989.
BERGSON, Henri. Duração e simultaneidade: a propósito da teoria de Einstein. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2006.
BERGSON, H. Memória e vida. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2006.
BERGSON, H. Matéria e memória. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2011.
DELEUZE, G. Bergsonismo. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1999.
KRAPP, P. Déjà vu: aberrations of cultural memory. Published by the University of Minnesota Press, 2004.