Taken as an ideal, the function of the library is to act as a kind of collective mind. Much like information is retained and filed away in applicable zones of the brain during sleep, so too does the library collect and archive language, data, ephemera, and individual and collective histories – preserving these artefacts in relevant catalogues until we need to draw upon them again. 

But this institutionalised, synthesised brain suffers from similar fallacies to its biological counterpart; things are misplaced, misnomered, or missed entirely. It is here in the unknown – the dark matter, sitting between the structure of the archive – that new connections occur. What generative potential rests in image fragments, incomplete records, partially told stories?

Edited by Kate Rhodes and Rory Hyde, and published alongside a major exhibition at State Library Victoria, You Have a New Memory explores the creative possibilities of memory loss in the library. Tracing a path through the State Library’s 4.5 million collection items, this book unearths images that ask us to reexamine how a library remembers, and how our own thoughts interact with the memories of others.