Ferdinand Waas

The Show Match that took place on the 16th of June 2024 shows two memory athletes, Katie Kermond and Don Michael Vickers, playing an altered version of a usual match. In a regular competition, the categories in which the athletes are competing use randomly generated data as grounds to compare their memory capacities. Here, they are playing with emotional/personal data sourced from the athletes’ own lives. Such as birthdays of loved ones, pictures of known faces and locations, and words they use a lot in their daily life. The match is hosted and streamed live on Twitch in collaboration with Johannes Mallow, a two time memory world champion and an active ambassador for memory sports and the official and the Memory League, an online memory sports platform.

Rigid numeric approaches have been increasingly adopted by institutions like the Financial Ministry (seen from the windows of KABK) or the ICJ, the latter going as far as to calculate the time between pauses in a testimony so as to determine the reliability of a witness, quantifying their proposed truth. By inserting emotionally charged memories in the set framework, the quantification processes of memory are disrupted and questioned.