2008-2009 | online interactive narratives & video installation with machine-like physical interface |
variable dimensions
I wonder how people remember things who don’t film,
don’t photograph,
don’t tape
— Sans Soleil, Chris Marker
memoryFrames stands as a visual archive of intimate and recent memory created using home videos which are exchanged and adapted to fictional stories to create the intimate and recent memory of each protagonist.
It is a virtual staging of the memory-forming process built from the audio-visual registers we make in our daily lives. The formation of memory is like making a film: by joining frames, we create a movie of ourselves. Internet as the convergence space where information is connected and reorganized enables this to be an open process, converting the user into the editor of the memories of different characters who for different reasons are confronted to their past.
In the age of visibility, we live in a world that has swallowed its double. Plunged into this overpopulated iconic fauna, not only do images determine our present life but also our memories. The notion of the operation of memory as a mechanisms that transcends the distance of time added to the value of the image as a fundamental instrument in this process leads us to the idea that the past is accessible through images. Images produce, or at least create the illusion of producing, a situation in which the past and the present co-exist. We then decide to collect the portrait of everything we wish to remember or do not wish to forget. Images are thus converted into our memory.
If we understand the construction of intimate memory as a narrative construction, we can recognize in this process the elements inherent to dramatic structure. Hence, these moments of narrative inflection correspond to stages which, except for the different contexts, are repeated in every story. If we share a set of visual codes to represent our lives and to position ourselves in the world, the question arrises: are our memories (or the images of our memories) interchangeable?
Online project: www.memoryframes.org
