Entre a Memória e o Abismo: regimes de hipermemória, datificação e a arte como desprogramação na cultura de dados /Between Memory and the Abyss: Hypermemory Regimes, Datification and Art as Deprogramming in Digital Culture
This essay investigates transformations of memory in the context of digital culture, datafication, and algorithmic control, proposing the notion of a hypermemory regime to describe the contemporary reconfiguration of how memory is produced, stored, and monetised. Structured in three interconnected parts, the text begins by critically examining how memory has become a strategic field of dispute in the age of surveillance capitalism. Through the commodification of data and algorithmic governance, memory is no longer merely a human or cultural attribute—it is now central to new systems of power and behavioural control. In the second part, the essay turns to Vilém Flusser’s philosophical contributions—especially the texts Ars Memoria, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, and Filosofia da Caixa Preta [Towards a Philosophy of Photography]—to rethink the technical, symbolic, and ideological dimensions of memory. Flusser’s reflections anticipate many of today’s central concerns and offer critical tools for understanding the mediating role of artificial memories. Finally, the third part explores how art, through gestures of deprogramming, can act as a space of resistance within the hypermemory regime. For Flusser, to remember is not only to preserve but also to invent—to reopen experience to imagination, criticism, and freedom.