This project was done in the context of my thesis in the MFA in Communications Design at Pratt Institute. Investigating the evocation of memory, my thesis seeks to understand how episodes of the past can be communicated and experienced through design.
The past is perceived and remembered differently by everyone. Recollection allows for both singularity and multiplicity: a single moment of the past enabling a multiplicity of interpretations. Design can engage and mediate a dialogue between past, present, and future. Fragments of the past – in the form of voices, sounds, gestures, visuals, and sensations – create unique experiences and trigger profound responses.
Memorializing Memories is an interactive installation that allows for a new mode of communication, enabling a ‘global past’ to speak to a ‘personal past’. My approach consisted in creating a charged and immersive atmosphere, a portal for entering memory. Using a combination of visual and auditory media, the installation functions in experience sequences: from evocation, to interpretation, to participation.
The communication of something as intangible as memory has to remove the viewer from discernible reality and define a blank space for them to feel, perceive, and imagine. The visuals are abstract and establish a fluid realm of emotion for the viewer to explore, while the auditory component juxtaposes diverse voices, rhythms, and human sounds. Visuals and sounds alternate, according to people’s movement in the space.
Participants are prompted to share their experience and express their own memories on card-like artifacts. The installation then becomes an evolving collage of unique pasts, a ‘memorial’ of memory; as the convergence of the different fragments articulates deeper narratives.
The series of cards, collected after the installation, defines a large spectrum of self-expression. The drawings range from figurative, symbolic, to fully abstract, while some of the writings are more descriptive and naive, and others significantly enigmatic and speculative. The cards become timeless "memory-objects" that reveal a moment, a secret, a story, or simply an anecdote.
The following are pictures of my thesis book, which integrated all research, writing, design experiments, and documentation of the interactive installation shown above.
MFA Communications Design Thesis, Pratt Institute, 2016-2017. Advisor: Prof. T. Klinkowstein.