The hand-off — how a private memory becomes the shared record, copied from hand to hand until it is everyone's and no one's, and not quite what it was.
A real-time work, computed live and never repeating. Not a single world but a lineage: generation loss, made visible.
A procession of crystalline medallions recedes into the dark — seals struck to be reproduced exactly, each bearing the same inscription, each a copy of the one before it. Nearest is the latest copy: bright, bold, gilded — its legend swollen and smeared past reading, the gold laid like grease over the wear of every hand that kept it. Behind it each prior copy is cleaner and closer to true, the drift unwinding as you look further back, until the original waits at the end: faint, cool silver, its inscription crisp and even — intact, and unreachable. You cannot go back up the line; it only recedes. At the head, once in a long age, a new copy is struck from the current-nearest in a flash of light — a fresh double lifting off imperfect, every mark migrated a hair, and now and then a discrete error that locks in and is copied forward, faithfully, forever. Then the whole line advances a single step — a step is centuries here — and the oldest falls off the far end into the dark.
Each copy is made from the last copy, never the original — and each step is small, careful, honest. But error has no memory of being error: once introduced it is copied forward as reverently as the truth. The losses don't cancel; they compound. After enough hands the thing that arrives bears no resemblance to the thing that left, and every single step was faithful. No villain, no betrayal — just diligent hands and the arithmetic of small mistakes. The truth still exists; we simply cannot reach it, and the copy in our hands is louder. The brightest thing in the frame is the least true: confidence is a gilding, applied over loss.
After Alvin Lucier's I am sitting in a room: a melody copied down its own line. Each copy is its own loop, and it plays for the whole age that copy stands at the head — but the loop is taken from the copy before it, not from the source: a hair more out of tune, a phrase swollen or dropped, and now and then a wrong note that locks in and is repeated faithfully ever after. When the next copy is struck, its loop takes over — the same tune, one generation further gone. Beneath it a low room that never quite holds still, drifting across the long hours. Over the series' rootless open fifth, the warming third still withheld; where the rest of the series holds the fifth firm, here it smears — a lineage that never quite agrees with itself.
Provenance is the third piece of the series — What Remains — on the fragility of memory, individual and collective. It is the hand-off at the centre of the machine: the act that turns one mind's memory into the shared record, and rewrites it in transit. This is a different loss than melting or crumbling or refusing to melt — the past lost not by ruin but by only ever being handed the latest copy, drifting while it swears it has not. Its counterfeit gold is a question the series answers only at its close.
Joshua Borsman makes sculpture, sound, and kinetic work — staged in galleries, gardens, sidewalks, and orbit. The pieces take real processes and signals and turn them into work that unfolds in time and refuses to repeat. joshuaborsman.com
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