About This Book
A library, taken as an ideal, works like a collective mind. It gathers language, data, ephemera and the histories of individuals and communities, files them into catalogues and holds them until someone needs to draw on them again. But this synthesised brain fails in much the same ways a biological one does. Things are misplaced, misnamed, or missed entirely—and it is in those gaps, the dark matter between the structures of the archive, that unexpected connections form.
Published alongside a major exhibition at State Library Victoria, You Have a New Memory traces a path through the library's 4.5 million collection items and asks what generative potential sits in image fragments, incomplete records and partially told stories.
The book takes its shape from the slideshow—once a domestic ritual of reminiscence, now an algorithmic prompt that pings a succession of photographs onto a phone screen. Street parties, infrastructure, medieval texts, family portraits, group hypnosis and fashion shows flash and converge. Images and text run alongside one another without quite aligning, and among the noise are scenes of shelves, boxes, server racks and staff—reminders that reaching a memory usually depends on someone's curiosity, organisation and care. Here too is the unwritten and the living: songlines, ceremony, culture.
Key Features
- Co-published by Perimeter Editions and State Library Victoria
- Designed by Stuart Geddes and Žiga Testen
- Draws on the State Library's collection of 4.5 million items
- Section-sewn softcover with dustjacket
- Issued alongside a major exhibition at State Library Victoria
What You'll Discover
- How an institutional archive remembers, misremembers and forgets
- A visual argument built through juxtaposition rather than sequence
- The labour behind access—cataloguing, preservation, storage, staffing
- Living and unwritten memory held alongside the documentary record
About the Author
Kate Rhodes is a curator and writer based in Naarm/Melbourne, with a long record of exhibition-making across design and visual culture.
Rory Hyde is a curator, writer and designer whose work spans architecture and the public role of cultural institutions. He is the author of Future Practice: Conversations from the Edge of Architecture.
Specifications
- Format: Section-sewn softcover with dustjacket
- Dimensions: 215 x 170 mm
- Pages: 304
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781922545725
- Publisher: Perimeter Editions and State Library Victoria
- Publication Date: 01 August 2026
Perfect For
Archivists, librarians and curators; designers interested in image sequencing and book structure; and readers drawn to how institutions hold public memory. Of particular interest to anyone following Melbourne's design publishing.