Random access memory

Memory is ambiguous. It gives us comfort, but also a sense of the eerie, the unchartered; we are often uncertain, untrusting of our own memory, particularly when recollections by others of the same event, appear to jeapordise our own thoughts. It is entirely based within physical matter, but like the "soul", it has an unreal, ethereal quality. Artist Kerry Tribe's recent work investigates memory, forgetfulness, ambiguity, and doubt, using recordable media to show the extremities of something that we – literally – take for granted.

Paul Luckraft, curator at Modern Art Oxford, collaborated with London's Camden Arts Centre and Bristol's Arnolfini to commission new work by three contemporary visual artists; Tribe was proposed by Arnolfini to be the final artist in the series. Her exhibition, Dead Star Light, covers a preoccupation with memory: personal and cultural. The works were made in 2009 and 10; they typify the forensic level of detail and investigation that Tribe puts into both her subject matter, and the way in which she covers and explores it. Many works embody a sense of craft, with Tribe working with animators, audio designers and other specialists in order to realise her work.

With memory as its subject matter, Dead Star Light also addresses issues of uncertainty. Her film HM (not shown at Modern Art Oxford) sees the brain as something which is less abstract, and more an organ which can be rewritten, as an operation on a patient's brain erases their short-term memory. Memory is changeable, vulnerable, and subject to influence: it is often more of a composite of information – it is a recollection of others' stories as well as ours. This makes evidence, whether ours or anyone else's, as prone to internal subjectivity as much as it is prone to external impact.

Tribe's work unpacks memory through narrative and through fragmented, degradable media. Milton Torres sees a ghost sees clipped-in audiotape lining three walls. While one tape recorder is playing an account of an American fighter pilot's encounter with a UFO over British airspace around 60 years ago (and declassified in 2008), the other tape recorder is erasing it. Both this period, and that of The Last Soviet, are not just based in a point in time, but are specifically based in the aftereffects of a grand narrative. "[Today], those grand narratives are not so present. The grand sweep of history is less certain, and it fluctuates much more quickly. There is a multiplicity now – events and trends happen simultaneously and it's not always clear what's coming from where."

Milton Torres sees a ghost

Milton Torres addresses the notion of individual versus collective memory, and what constitutes "reality". "People tell stories to others enough times to make them true to themselves. What does it take for someone to disbelieve everyone else and still maintain their position? It's overly trusting in their own memory, not considering how malleable, unreliable it is. However, [Torres' recollection] is juxtaposed with an official denial, creating doubt, with a redacted statement to the MoD. The piece does not mock Milton, but is open enough to be intriguing. It doesn't necessarily relate to what you see, but is a process by which the story has been told, forgotten, and then rediscovered, as you trace it around the room."

The use of analogue media gives the work a strange overtone of being in both the past and the present. As Luckraft says, the mass dumping of "old" media has reinvented it as something niche, something special; physical matter is even more revered by those that treasure and want to preserve it. The media has more physical mass, more weight, than a computer file. Tribe is addressing the idea of change in our culture quite obliquely; her view of media is central to her work.

Perhaps our view of memory is changing through the ephemera of digital updates. Be it status, photos, or emails, we are processing more and simply needing to apply a stronger filter about what to discard – what to forget. We will never be able to absorb the cumulative amount of information collected, inviting the possibility of a more fragile memory becoming more possible through overload: the loss of an ability to apply strong filters.

With quantity comes control. Some notable exceptions aside, Governments have effectively ceded control of information; Tribe's The Last Soviet covers the period when cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev was in space, being completely oblivious to the coup taking place to oust Mikhael Gorbachev. On the ground, Soviet TV stations broadcast Swan Lake instead of news on the coup, to patch over any notion that there was unrest in the Union. Such a movement is now, as we have seen in the speed and scale of the Arab Spring, completely unthinkable. "In simple terms, there is much more sharing of information and ways to expose truth. It opens up questions of whose truth is broadcast, as mainstream media takes up the story and it makes up a new version of the truth."

Told through re-enactment and recollection, The Last Soviet playfully avoids the question of what happened to Krikalev on his return. Was he confused? Did he lose his mind? Did he enjoy being separated from the world? The viewer does not quite know as to whether he is a real person. Tribe leaves that very much open. Perhaps, it is a piece of propaganda from the artist herself.

The Last Soviet also plays with a feeling of isolation, of disconnection; of something that, maybe, we can no longer do. Perhaps a temporary removal from this seemingly ever-increasing pace of change is good for the soul, although, increasingly, we can not find a way to extract ourselves (witness the tapping of Blackberrys by the pool on holiday). Tribe spent a number of years in Berlin, with the history of the city as an "interzone" - an east-meets-west point, separate from the rest of Germany – acting as something of a reference point in this work.

As an exhibition, Dead Star Light changes the configuration of the Gallery: the film Parnassius Mnemosyne, Tribe's abstract animated film which shows butterfly wings in close-up, is shown in a temporary blacked-out room within the same hall that houses Torres. This room-in-a-room provides a contemplative place, an area to rest from the recorded-and-erased media that whizzes around the walls outside. The Last Soviet is housed cinema-style in a fully blacked-out room with a bench; the end of the exhibition reinforces a feeling of playfulness with media and form, by displaying a photo of Tribe's equipment about to film objects in space against the static backdrop of a Soviet spaceship – a "dramatisation" used in The Last Soviet. It's this double-take, this not-quite-knowing what's real and what's artificial, that again asks us to look at our own memory. Did we know that these scenes in the film were not "real" footage? How does their artificiality play with our memory?

Parnassius Mnemosyne

This extraordinary spectacle of carefully-arranged, carefully-constructed physical media invites us to take a closer look; to consider the ambiguity of what we know, how we see it when it becomes part of our personal and collective pasts, and the role that media plays in capturing a given reality. Whether our digital detritus brings us closer to our memories or pushes them further away in the light of collective memory and the shared experience, will be debated for years to come.

Paul Luckraft is curator at Modern Art Oxford. "Kerry Tribe: Dead Star Light" is showing at Modern Art Oxford from 27/09/11 until 20/11/11.
Further information on Kerry Tribe is available on her website.