Harwood (GB) is an international multimedia artist who previously co-founded "The Working Press" and "Underground Press" and is a regular contributor to conferences on the electronic arts. Harwood works at Artec with the long term unemployed.

During the winter of 1994 to 1995, Harwood worked with a group of people from Ashworth Maximum Security Hospital to produce an interactive programme that embodied their life experiences. The skins of those taking part were scanned to assemble physical traces of their lives, defined by notions of insanity. These were then made to form a composite individual through which the programme user can make close contact with significant events in the lives of those involved.

Ashworth Mental Hospital is both home and prison to six hundred and fifty people of whom seventy percent are mentally disordered "offenders". These patients are admitted to Ashworth Hospital on the authority of the British courts or from other prisons at the direction of the Home Secretary. Thirty percent of patients at Ashworth, however, have not offended and are referred to the hospital by social service departments and health authorities. The average length of stay at Ashworth is eight years, but a minority of patients will spend the rest of their lives at the hospital.

This artwork is about recording the lives of the patient/staff group that act as a mirror to ourselves (i.e., "normal" society) and to our amnesia when confronted with our society's excesses. This forgetting is a dark shadow cast by plenty, a nightmare for some that reconstitutes misinformation and fear about insanity.

"Rehearsal of Memory" simultaneously challenges our assumptions of normality and confronts us with a clean comfortable machine, filled with filth, with the forbidden and with the demented, its hygienic procedures contaminated by the effluent of excluded human relations. For a long time we have assigned machines our dirty laundry while maintaining the image of their enamelled white veneers. Now is the time for filth.