MEMORY SCREEN is an impossible book which by now exists in at least five distinct versions each of which begins with a snapshot of a graffito on a garage door beneath Castle Market in Sheffield. The graffito consists of a spraycanned outline figure alongside the words Memory Screen. An alternative reading is Memori Scheem and so this may be the book’s correct title; the figure is either female or androgyne, the face somewhat monkey-like. Most of the versions of Memory Screen consist of a sequence of graphics many of which include words and word-fragments. The verbal element sometimes detaches itself and becomes associated with a series of aphorisms which form as it were a sequence of parallel texts. The parallel texts sometimes appear to be poems but are arguably no such thing. Yet they are not, for the most part, captions. None of the versions is complete or completable.’
Memory Screen will be shown at Bank Street as a sequence of 54 framed triptychs and in the electronic version prepared for Alan Halsey’s Marginalien (Five Seasons Press 2005). A previous version was shown at the Bury Text Festival in 2005.
