Brainswarming felt like a natural outlet. I love group collaboration, speaking out, and building off the ideas of others. My thesis can’t be entirely collaborative. This is my project. There are times when I need to bounce ideas off myself. Brainswarming felt like a solo brainstorming session.

You don’t know what’s happening here, but don’t worry, I’m going to use this blog post to synthesize my thoughts and put to words my brainswarm.

I began with two goals, questions, objectives, whatever you want to call it:

  1. What are my relationship to things, places, and memories? How do these relationships make me feel?
  2. How can I conduct an experiment that taps into someone else’s relationship to things, places, and memories?

I began with my resources. The obvious: the things in my apartment, my roommates, family, friends, girlfriend, Zoom, computer records of my past, a huge photo library that my dad maintains, my digital footprint, NYC, and my memories.

I thought about sub-goals, objectives, questions, whatever. Questions like: how do the relationships to places and things shape how we grow and who we become? How is a memory contained in physical objects and things? What is this relationship between the abstract and the physical? What is the best way to overcome a haunting memory? Why do we hold onto certain memories, and forget others? How does a thing come to embody a memory? Does it matter if there’s an object attached to a memory? What if the object relocates, does it lose the meaning of the memory? What is within us that presents that “spark” when you hold a memento or visit a special place?

My brainswarming session took a turn. I thought about negative memories, the memories that still cloud my thoughts. The guilt and regret from those memories. How I avoid thinking about those certain memories and facing them head-on. Some thoughts make me cringe. It feels like I have someone else’s perspective and they can watch me visibly scrunch my face. I see others see through me. Sometimes I even twist those moments, convincing myself it wasn’t as bad as it was. Or sometimes blowing those memories out of proportion. I wish some memories can just vanish, or I could go back in time. I also thought about my good memories. This was much more challenging for me. I have plenty of memories with my family, places we vacationed to, objects we cherished, relatives that we are close with. But how about my personal memories? I could think of a few that I’m proud of. It makes me cringe how I don’t have a swath of my own memories to look back on. I feel defined by those moments. People reassure me that I have so much to be proud of. Getting into college, graduating college, starting my Master’s, the projects I have worked on during school, my internships, and so on. I struggle to view these as proud moments. It all feels like a natural progression, this is what I should be doing. I’m no different than anyone else who does these things. I want more memories that I look back on and say,”this is a defining moment for me, I did this myself, this made me a better person.” I feel defined by others and situations that are out of my control. Part of me thinks this is okay. Without these moments I’m nobody. I’m still young, I have time to create these memories.

For my thesis, I want to focus on the memories that weigh on myself and others? Why do we feel defined by these moments? We have positive memories but we tend to focus on the negative ones. It’s a feeling of wanting to escape, to be free from these moments.

This portion of my brainswarming inspired many of my decisions for my Cornell Box. Here is my box.

 

After making my box I thought about the compartmentalized nature of our memories. We have bad and good ones. The bad memories have a certain stickiness that good memories don’t. They overwhelm us. The good memories are imprisoned within the bad ones. So often I want the good ones to escape. The one’s that do aren’t enough. I feel like I stay afloat by a few good memories, while I’m brought down by my bad memories. 

Why hold onto things that weigh us down and why are the good memories imprisoned?

I also thought about how objects and places have a special aura to different people. Anyone who sees my box will see something different. Everyone has those momentos that mean so much to them, and are meaningless to others.

Brainswarming also made me think of my family. We have places that feel special. For us, Disney Parks have a unique aura. It feels safe. It’s our sanctuary, where we have grown up and built so many memories. And yes, keeping in the Disney theme, it’s magical. Another place that possesses this “spark” is our home. Though our lives have made us migrate away from our house, when we return, it feels like nothing has changed. We play games, sit around the living room together, and nudge each other. My parents are in the middle of selling this house. The house is empty, staged for house tours. I have gone home a few times and it’s strange. A place of so many memories is void of the things that remind me of those memories.

For my experiment, I decided to probe my family’s relationship to memories, things, and places. How do we all feel about our home, a virtual shrine of memories, disappearing from our lives? What comes to mind when we think of Disney World, or special vacation spots, or objects from our childhood?

I made a Google form designed to elicit raw reactions from my family. Through a series of family photos, images of special objects, pieces from our past, I collected a log of my family’s feelings towards our memories.

The instructions were simple:

Please respond with your raw reactions to these images in the next section. For each image, what comes to mind? What do you feel? Emotions? Free associate. Write in the space provided.

The log of responses can be found here. Here are some sample images.