Having finally visited the “Rebel Hearts” exhibition at the State Library Victoria last month, I was delighted to discover the recently launched “You Have a New Memory” exhibition at @library_vic.
Actually, I found the exhibition via the book You Have a New Memory (August 2026) co-published by the Library and Perimeter Editions (image credit: @perimeterbooks), thanks to a post by the latter. As usual, it is the words that drew my attention.
“Taken as an ideal, the function of the library is to act as a kind of collective mind. Much like information is retained and filed away in applicable zones of the brain during sleep, so too does the library collect and archive language, data, ephemera, and individual and collective histories – preserving these artefacts in relevant catalogues until we need to draw upon them again.“
“But this institutionalised, synthesised brain suffers from similar fallacies to its biological counterpart; things are misplaced, misnomered, or missed entirely. It is here in the unknown – the dark matter, sitting between the structure of the archive – that new connections occur. What generative potential rests in image fragments, incomplete records, partially told stories?“
There are more wonderful words describing how images and texts “flash and converge“, “[moving] beside one another without fully aligning, creating unexpected connections and meanings“. These, to me, are exactly how creative ideas and inspirations are generated.
I thought about Dr Hannibal Lecter’s “memory palace” as illustrated in the books Hannibal (1999) and Hannibal Rising (2006) by Thomas Harris. I also recalled Dreamcather (2021) by Stephen King, where the character Jonesy is trapped within his own mind as the alien parasite “Mr Gray” takes over his body. Here, Jonesy’s mind is more like a warehouse than a palace, and how he fights against Mr Gray is both genius and hilarious. I always remember the funny formatting, with the word “bacon” appearing in increasingly bigger fonts. Brilliant.
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Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音 