Technology has rapidly transformed the way we store memory and our very own relationship to this critical aspect of being human. What can music and poetry tell us about this dramatic shift in our everyday lives?

In this cross-disciplinary event, Poet in the City and Aurora Orchestra uncover the story of a ground-breaking new technology that will enable us to remember more than ever before. Through the world premieres of electrically-charged new music and poetry, they explore the question: what happens when matter, music, and language are placed under pressure?

Inspired by this question, composer Martin Suckling and poet Francis Leviston have created electrically-charged new works that draw on the memory of two great artistic forebearers, Franz Schubert and Emily Dickinson. Suckling explores the idea of music under pressure by echoing, distorting, and crystallising fragments of Schubert’s sublime String Quintet. Leviston references the voltage of Dickinson’s densely packed poems and wonders how Dickinson might have responded to this advance in technology. Experimental physicist Professor Markys Cain, one of the pioneers spearheading this new technology, joins Suckling and Leviston to present his reflections.

Commissioned by Bio Nano Consulting Ltd for the dissemination of PETMEM (Piezoelectronic Transduction Memory Device), a European Commission-funded project which brings together universities, research institutions and companies to explore low-voltage memory technologies.