Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter

The Museum of Jurassic Technology
9341 Venice Boulevard
Culver City, California 90232

The Delani/Sonnabend Halls
Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter

The Delani/Sonnabend Halls which occupy the entire rear quarters of the Museum's original building house a sequential array of exhibits which, when taken together, detail the lives and work of Madelena Delani, a singer of art songs and operatic material and Geoffery Sonnabend, a neurophysiologist and memory researcher who's three volume work "Obliscence: Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter" stands a milestone in the field.

In the work Mr. Sonnabend departed from all previous memory research with the premise that memory is an illusion. Forgetting, he believed, not remembering is the inevitable outcome of all experience. From this perspective, he states, "We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrieveability of its moments and events."

more:
"'Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter' by Geoffrey Sonnabend
An Encapsulation by Valentine Worth"

New York Times review of Lawrence Weschler's "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology."

[text and graphic from museum website.]