The project was conceived as a contribution to the RCAHMW’s Explore Your Archive: Memory Archive, held at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, on 22 November 2017. One of the event’s ambitions was to explore memory in relation to dementia. Accordingly, my sound-artwork, I. Nothing. Lack., addressed the themes of remembering and forgetting, principally.

The source material for the project was derived from cassette-tape recordings of a quartet of sermons on Psalm 23. They were delivered by the Rev. J. Douglas MacMillan (1933–91) – a minister in the Free Church of Scotland and former shepherd – on four consecutive mornings from the 13 to 19 August 1979, at Bethel Welsh Baptist Church, Baker Street, Aberystwyth.

The tape encoding represents a technological memory of MacMillan’s preaching. On the 24 November 2017, 38 years later, that memory was recalled, technologically, at the same place wherein it had been first formed. Members of the public witnessed a token re-presentation of the original audition.

The analogue information was digitally transferred in order to permit a variety of interventions in, and reconfigurations of, the ‘memory’, using digital sound modulation devices, as well as analogue playback machines, such as cassette-tape and reel-to-reel recorders. These are the same technologies used to capture and copy the sermons at the time. (Some of the digitised material was, thereafter, transferred back to magnetic tape for presentation and manipulation in situ.)

The processes by which the digitised content was transformed were derived from the deficits associated with dementia, including: erasure of information, errant recall, language abnormalities, slowing down, repetition, loss of continuity, agitation, discursive behaviour, and changes in character.

The choice of Psalm 23 at the textual anchor for the project was not arbitrary. Older people living with dementia, even in its advanced stage, while failing to form and retrieve new memories nevertheless retain their recollection of that scripture intact. This is due largely to their having committed it to memory at a formative age.

The paper presents an account of the presentation and reception of the project, as well as of subsequent configurations of the sound material generated after the day of presentation. In so doing, it examines the sonic technologies, processes, and aesthetic implications involved in analogue to digital to analogue conversion, and in the transformation of material from the past using medial modes from the present. Furthermore, the discussion addresses the peculiar virtues of sound-residues as historical documentation, and their analysis and interpretation through sound art practice and sonic history.

It also draws from the project principles and exemplars of how collaboration between artist-academics and public institutions, such the Commission and CADW (which also supported the endeavour), can generate new insights and synergies that would be otherwise unobtainable. And, moreover, to do so in such a way as to be publicly accessible, educative, challenging, relevant to social concerns, and contributory to an understanding and articulation of mental illness.

The presentation is, here, in two parts (which does not reflect the divisions of the paper).