Memory Hierarchy

One of the great truths of today's reality is that it's mostly fake. Technological advancement, in a dual process of exteriorization (our memories and organs extended into manipulable artifacts) and interiorization (artificial structures installed as prostheses), has muddied our waters so that we are unable to tell truths from lies, actuality from abstraction. Musing on the contemporary culture of “deepfakes,” where interlocking algorithms meet the omnipresence of surveillance, Eli Osheyack’s Memory Hierarchy is a gesamtkunstwerk, crystallized into the memorial device of a record. When first performed live at Unsound Festival in 2019, Osheyack, together with collaborator, the late Adam Dupré, captured and live-streamed the audiences’ motions. Evidence of this event is rendered here as album artwork, transporting audiences into a doubly displaced moment in time. With its almost epical structure, punctuated by recurring howls and gasps, Liar’s Dividend feels like an omen—of, among other things, a Nietzschean last man suffering from gluttony. On the B-side, Mutual Shaping and Tertiary leave us, instead, revelling in warped time and disorientation. Dedicated to Adam Dupré.