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A dimly lit room with a simple wooden desk and chair (plate 1). A hanging lamp illuminates a kind of writing-pad that is inserted into the tabletop. It is a rather contemporary writing-pad, a computer screen on which words, sentences continuously appear, disappear, and re-appear. '... to transfer to a records centre for temporary storage ... one hand writing upon the surface of the Mystic Pad while another periodically raises its cover ... to erase, to wipe or rub out, literally or figuratively ... archivist was an officer of great dignity ...' Fragments of text flash up, fade, are overwritten by new text segments, leaving faint traces before they vanish.
The Wunderblock (2000) is the title of this installation, alluding to the children's toy that provided Sigmund Freud with a model for the representation of his theory of memory. As is widely known, the actual 'Mystic Writing-Pad' consists of a slab of wax that is covered with a transparent sheet, the top end of which is fixed to the slab...
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Without the presence of the past, we are without consciousness.

How did you get started as an artist, where did you study?

As an undergraduate I began my studies in literature with Irving J. Weiss, who introduced me to the ideas of McLuhan and Cage. I then continued studies at what was probably one of the world's first institutes of new media - the Center for Media Study in Buffalo, New York, where I concentrated on video art with Woody and Steina Vasulka, the founders of the Kitchen in New York. It was a very productive environment in Buffalo, with an interdisciplinary discourse in electronic arts, which included video, experimental film and sound. There was also an art space, 'Hallwalls,' founded by Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman. The music department at the university was directed by Morton Feldman, and the Creative Associates, a program of the music department, was famous for inviting visiting composers and performers from around the world...

Originally published in From the Archives, Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, 2003

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[Motto:] 'When the time comes, this compendium will serve as a great treasury of memories and a unique proof of resurrection.' (Danilo Kis: Encyclopedia of the Dead) (1)

The art of memory, which traces back to Roman antiquity, begins with an unfortunate accident. During a celebration, the banquet hall collapsed, burying the guests beneath it. Only the poet Simonides escaped death 2). Because he recalled where everyone sat before the collapse, he was later able to identify the maimed corpses...

Originally published in: Arnold Dreyblatt, From the Archives, Heidelberg, 2003
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Each Archive division is treated differently as to the selection process, storage media, data format, etc. Where possible, I have generally considered a phase of digital storage as a suitable goal before selection, categorization and final display. Maintaining as much material as possible in digital form allows maximum flexibility in terms of later treatment and presentation. The texts are gradually entered into a database, which has been specially structured for the particular nature of the respective data. This initial process, including entering, categorization and database programming has taken from weeks to years, depending on the condition and size of the data, as well as on the financial funding available.
I usually choose a particular data source (book, database, subject matter, etc.) with an end result in possible final presentation in mind. Additionally, I take into account the complimentary aspect of a particular material in relation to the content and structure of the other archival holdings in my possession before considering acquisition. I see the selection and categorization process as the application of an almost institutional administration on the data which allows retrieval, access and treatment. Systems of categories are revised extensively and lists of "keywords" are created out of repeated readings and through the use of "search engines" and linguistic word frequency analysis...
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One of my more grievous disappointments in life was the cancellation of a lecture I was invited to give about eight years ago to a group of software manufacturers. I had a wonderful title: Artificial memory before and after the printed book. At the time, pc people were still unsure about how to dish up DOS to the user. Should they stick with commands in words, the way DOS started, or move to icons in the style of Apple? Although I preferred commands, I was going to predict that the icons would win out. My prediction was based on the memory systems that were developed in classical antiquity and which flourished in the Renaissance...

het Financiele Dagblad, Amsterdam, 22/24 August, 1998

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H.H.: You have made a media opera, composed several musical pieces, there has been an exhibition, a book will be published soon, you are preparing an installation, - everything in connection with this book Who's Who in Central & Eastern Europe 1933. What kind of special quality mode this book a vein of gold for your artistic work, so that it become your personal bible?

A.D.: I have always been interested in personal stories, which have to do with personal dislocations. People who have parents from two different countries, personal histories in which one is transported through migrations of peoples or wars, the moment at which historical situations rupture one's life. My interest in this book, the bible as you said, is this collection of dislocated fragments. This book is a complex network of personal myth construction: a geo-political history of Central and Eastern Europe put together as if it were a puzzle from thousands of individual stories, revealing an image of a vanished world captured at a critical point in time, which only a few years later would no longer exist. But to take your question at a personal level, which I prefer to avoid, this interest also comes from third generation shock. I still feel as if I am suffering from the emigration of my grandparents...


(Interview by Hannah Hurtzig in Berlin on September 22nd 1994, published in THEATERSCHRIFT, Memory Issue, Nr. 8, 1994)
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As an American artist who has lived over thirteen years in West, Central and East Europe; my projects have been realized in a variety of forms, such as contemporary opera and interactive performance, installation, and publication in book and digital media. Continuing to be based on found historical source materials; I have attempted to stimulate questions of memory and the collective as well as biography and micro- history...
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Introduction: Beginnings

Over the last years I have been developing collaborative projects involving text, image and space that have been realized in a variety of forms, such as contemporary opera and interactive performance, installation, and publication. My work has touched on questions of memory, both collective and individual. In the process of de- and re- constructing a hypertext from these original materials, my attentions have grown to include the subject of archiving and storage itself, which seems to reflect on the current preoccupation, particularly in Europe, with the subject of Memory: what we choose to forget, what we choose to remember and the how, why, and where of storage and memorializing...

(Originally published in Communication Arts Journal, University of Southern California, 1997)

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Arnold Dreyblatt, an American artist based in Berlin, has been working on a series of projects--an opera, a book, installations, multi-media performances--that raise fascinating questions about biography, memory, and all the ways in which we recollect and interpret the traces of other lives. Several years ago, Dreyblatt found a copy of Who's Who in Eastern and Central Europe in 1933 in a store in Turkey. He has taken entries from this volume (published in Switzerland) to create a database and an archive that have served as the basis for many forms of reassemblage. Recently, he has produced multi-media performance installations--entitled Memory Arena--in various European cities, and these productions consist of more than a dozen modes of presenting and animating this and other archival material, and include exhibitions about archives as well. The primary spaces in Memory Arena are a fully operational "Archive" (a repository of all the biographical files, which can be checked out by any visitor), and the Arena, a hall with twelve reading stations where one can listen to and watch readings of these biographical fragments (the lines being read are also projected simultaneously on a Data Wall, almost like a stock ticker). Each reader is given a text composed of pieces of the Who's Who entries relevant to a particular rubric, such as a Profession, Travels, Education, Parents, or Conferences, and the person reads for a specific number of minutes. The installations also contain many other forms and spaces of biographical representation: video, slides, computer terminals, web sites, music, an isolation booth where can see nothing but only hear the readers, and so on...

An earlier version of this paper was presented for the Division on Autobiography, Biography, and Life Writing at the Modern Language Association Conference in Toronto on December 30, 1997.

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P.S.: You call your piece Memory Arena an installation, but it has also the components of a concert, a theater, an art performance, a conceptual artwork, and a media art piece, especially now with the website. (which discipline did I forget?). Finally you call it an 'hypertext installation'. So even if a hypertext has often a arbitrary in and outpoint, your project has a certain history. What is the start point and what is the goal through a line of selected or given locations of performances?...
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Arnold Dreyblatt is the creator/producer of Memory Arena (http://www.uni-lueneburg.de/memory/). The project is based on a found text-the biographical dictionary Who's Who in Central and East Europe 1933. The dictionary was transformed into a hypertext database and then into a 'hypertext opera,' which premiered in East Berlin in February 1991. The biographical data were then revised for a new print edition consisting of text segments from 765 biographies which appear both in alphabetical order and have been categorized according to 143 themes. Memory Arena -A Journey through the Archive-has been presented as a multimedia project in various forms: it has been staged as an interactive performance/installation in a physical space where visitors can browse through files created from Who's Who and other biographical data, texts about the process of archiving and other documents. Memory Arena also exists as CD-ROM and is now available on the Web. Arnold Dreyblatt, who is best known in the US as a composer, currently lives in Berlin. IA spoke to him during a recent visit to New York...


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The unification of Germany implies for Berlin a duplication of official cultural institutions (theater, opera, Museum and Academies of arts and science). The governments of Kohl and Clinton: the politics of spending cuts. The West Berlin Shiller Theater with more than 25 million dollars yearly) -as Germany's most highly-supported state theater hasn't produced a theater piece worth seeing in many years and will now close. The art scene isn't shedding a tear. Since the departure of Rene Block, who organized some of the most interesting festivals (Inventions, Vexations, etc.) in Berlin over the last years; the DAAD (hot-spot Number One in the eighties) has also become uninteresting. There's disorientation all over, but with a chance of new mixes. And so the former East Berlin has now become the more interesting: Prenzlauer Berg, Sheunenviertel, Potsdamer Platz. The young Galerie o zwei in East Berlin Bohemian quarter Prenzlauer Berg (Oderbergerstr. 2, D-10435) exists since two years and fall's back on the engagement and initiative of the Dresdener artist Wolfgang Krause. He understands his storefront gallerie as a communication possibility between colleague artists and the inhabitants who live in the neighboring street. He's attempting to create an open situation in which we can be in discussion with the artists and who's working process is visible. Solo exhibitions of artists -from over sixteen nations- and from all disciplines have been shown...

Heidi Paris and Peter Gente
(In Memory of Heidi Paris, 1950 - 2002)
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A.D.: I have always been interested in personal stories, which have to do with personal dislocations. People who have parents from two different countries, personal histories in which one is transported through migrations of peoples or wars, the moment at which historical situations rupture one's life. My interest in this book, the bible as you said, is this collection of dislocated fragments. This book is a complex network of personal myth construction: a geo-political history of Central and Eastern Europe put together as if it were a puzzle from thousands of individual stories, revealing an image of a vanished world captured at a critical point in time, which only a few years later would no longer exist...
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Several years ago, in an old second-hand book shop in Istanbul, the American composer Arnold Dreyblatt discovered a rare copy of 'Who's Who in Central & East Europe 1933'. The book was published in 1934 in Zurich and handwritten on the frontispiece was the name of its original owner - 'Dr. S. Schmidt, Istanbul, Turkey.'
The volume contained over 10,000 biographies: a travel and address guide for and about people from business and politics; facts about Achmed, King of Albania with lists of his decorations; a military nurse, who as private secretary to General Pilsudski held lectures on moral disarmament; an engraver of gold medallions for Pope Leo XIII; the court pianist of the last Austrian Emperor; or the man who invented the rotating therapeutic bed.
Dreyblatt, who himself comes from a Jewish family that was spread all over Russia, Poland, Lithuania, and Austria-Hungary, was seduced by the hidden layers: personal, intimate details, hopes, fears, and life philosophies. In order to search out the various connections between people, places and historical events, 771 biographies were chosen. and entered into a Hypertext computer program, where they were sorted and organized into specific categories. From this material, a working version of the text was extracted based on personal and thematic connections. This version of the text, both spoken and sung in the piece, is, as Dreyblatt explains, only one of many possible variations...
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