Abstract

Memories are fluid. It changes shapes and patterns alongside our life journey. Deriving from the name of French historian Pierre Nora’s collection, the title stands for “the sites of memories”. Les Lieux de Mémoire.zip condenses those sites inside multi-dimensional shapes of houses, deconstructing concepts of memory and space with poetic and minimal visual aesthetics. The project creates an immersive theater-like environment for the audience to explore memories from micro and macro viewpoints, as they can stoop or crouch to observe the moving images of intimate memories inside the physical bubble house, and roam around to reveal texts from body-tracking movements. While switching angles of looking at the project, the audience hovers between fragmentation and wholeness, as they change roles from empathetic observers to active participants, echoing the projection contents from intimate memory fragments to collective memory texts.

Research

The bubble house is constructed with air pillows, originally manufactured for shipping protection purposes. The application of the material demonstrates the concept that intimate memory fragments are under protection. The deliberately small scale resonates with our view of childhood houses that everything seems smaller than imagination. Contents in the bubble house are all based on AI-generated images, in forms mimicking the fMRI brain image, since the process of image prompt construction is proven to be related to memory retrieval. The revealing interaction could be seen as a future retrieval method of collective memories. Contents are text-to-image prompts for collective memories that are forbidden or censored through history. Images or video records of those memories do not exist on the internet or public media in certain regions. One of the only methods to recall those memories in the future might be AI generation. References: Bachelard, G. (2014). The poetics of space. Penguin Classics. Wang, Tingting et al. “The brain mechanism of memory encoding and retrieval: a review on the fMRI studies.” Sheng li xue bao : [Acta physiologica Sinica] 61 5 (2009): 395-403. Takagi, Yu & Nishimoto, Shinji. High-resolution image reconstruction with latent diffusion models from human brain activity. (2022). 10.1101/2022.11.18.517004.

Technical Details

MadMapper/ Kinect/ Midjourney/ Module8/ Adobe Suite