The performative moments gathered during the Epic Memory project were materialized in text (field notes), video, and audiotape. Field notes consist of our immediate interpretations. Video, our primary medium, was taken in contexts where permissible. Audio was at times taken when video was deemed to be inappropriate. The decision of what and when to record took place during specific interviews, during museum visits, and during certain of our own moments of deliberation and was predicated upon what we deemed appropriate to our project aims. Much of the video-work in Epic Memory was an experiment in the mediation of performative contexts and multiplicity. We sought to maintain the richness and complexity in the media of these performative moments without reducing them in prepackaged interpretations. Still, we realize that any process of mediation involves an intervention in the selection of what to film, record, or write down. All mediations are subject to this criticism—one can’t get around it. Nonetheless, without some form of presentation a moment is unavailable for analysis. Aside from our personal memories of what occurred no intervention will ever be possible.

“Modern memory is, above all, archival” (Nora 1995, 636). We do not simply wish to venerate these traces through their preservation. Our intent is for a video archive, the materialization of these field experiences, to provide a space for individuals to revisit performative moments and articulate their own personal connections. Here the archive is envisioned as a space for engagement. It is yet another field for further fieldwork. This constant reworking of the material and the reiteration of that process is epic memory.

The concept of rhizome, popularized in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987), is central to this endeavor. Here one might describe this concept in the context of performance as a step beyond intertextuality, where the site of the text becomes a space of interaction between multiple texts. In the performative contexts captured during the Epic Memory project such interaction extends to incorporate exchanges between materiality, place, action, and time, and memory and poetics.

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