Remember This

Digital installation

Our memories constantly fade. Our synapses create proteins that cause neural networks in our brains to light up and recall a childhood dog or our trip home from work a few weeks ago. Each time we call on a memory, a protein is created again, sometimes different, sometimes maybe not at all, and the memory shifts. It begins to take on a softer hue or maybe attach parts of the current context to what was. Parts that were once important become less so -- the past blends with our current context and setting, taking cues from the us that is in the present.

Remember This is about experiencing this process in an external way. It's a project about realizing the parts of this process that are human alone; the forgetting and damping effects of context. When the machine is turned on it takes an image of the space in front of it, compresses the image to a set of points that best represent that image's composition, and then draws this representation. After finishing this set of points, it takes another image, compresses it, combines that with what it thinks it previously drew, and then draws this new set of points. This process of combing the previous and current point sets is done using a function that has a learning curve to it: over time the function weights variations in the scene (new people or objects) as being less significant if the variations do not alter the scene in a statistically dramatic way. Impact of the machine's memory is dependent on the time since it captured the initial memory (when it was turned on) and how dramatic the variation is of what it is currently looking at compared to what it believes it first looked at.

As the viewer watches, he and the machine are both linked by the process of memory. As the machine draws, the viewer by default will think of previous experiences of watching the drawing take place (whether long ago or just moments before), while his brain feeds him experiences that relate to his current context. As the machine externalizes and tries to mimic in a clinical and objective way the memory of the space between it and viewer, the drawing that is created belongs not to the machine (as it has no way to look at the piece as a whole) or the viewer. It is a memory set aside: external and detached. Maybe this is what we hope our process of memory could achieve, to expel and allow others to fully see and understand our view and experience. But maybe memory that isn't bounded and confined, fading and picking up false facets through new experience and context, isn't memory at all.

creatures as standing waves

Scrap Wood, Screws

I'm not sure it is possible to collect all the parts of anything. There are always pieces that will lay at different layers; at different scales. Smaller or bigger. Floating around a scene like electrons orbiting a nucleus -- far off in the distance but important to the global composition. In the moment of capturing and bounding our surroundings they cease to be what they were. They become an object made new: maybe angular or soft like the brush strokes that describe children's stories. The object is outside itself--projected/injected into a space that is not worse or better, but is undeniably different.

Prescriptions for Awe and Wonder

Latex Mural

The process of creating is a frantic one. It starts with an idea that seems strange and out of place – something like large expanses on the surface of a strange distant planet where on the horizon giant sunflowers grow with childhood photos scattered about their stems. Far off in the distance this idea seems familiar and connected to one's being, but the place in between seems barren and lonely. It is the pull of this horizon, this idea that sits just beyond what one understands, that pushes the process and oils the thoughts and actions to move in a particular direction.

Mirroring this unfamiliar and lonely place are the temporary destinations, the landings in a continual staircase. The output of the creative process that causes critique and thoughts among others. That binds you to people who you share the idea with – each person coming close to holding a singular foundation in their mind, but still alone in the subtly. It is at this temporary destination that there is a sensation of calm and place. Of coming home to oneself.

Walking in the stairwell of Prescriptions for Awe and Wonder is to experience both sides of the creative process. The frantic and the calm together. To look upon it like cave paintings of a hunt.

a summary of 120 hours on the internet

Video, 11min 24sec

In the age of the self promoter and social networks that leap across timezones and continents like eyes glancing through a single's bar, the process of creating identity becomes progressively easier to tailor. Yet the canvas and body we tailor to – the digital landscape that we are projected into -- forces us to represent ourselves in very specific dimensions. Through our homemade videos, musings, and webcam footage, we twist and bend into the digital sphere and are at once unique and expressive but also lost and buried in a landscape that has the ability to make the self feel foreign.

Talk to me.

Drop me a line if you want to talk about anything. You can also find me on Skype (mvonrose) if you're a voice sort of person.