Me-more-y.
Preparing myself to forget. Exercises to remember

The room was setup to create an immersive experience. In the center, a plinth, where the spectator interacted with the main section. The place was divided into two areas with two different wall colours and no artificial light. They represented the lights and shadows where we move when we try to remember. During the day the natural light passed through the transparent printouts. When the sun was set, the only light was coming from the screens and a small light on the floor that created a dramatic light through the acrylics.

• Retrieve memories. When remembering, memories appear blurry, cloudy… This exercise represents how our brain retrieves them. They seem close, they merge, they connect, once they seem connected, they dematerialized for a moment to become the image again. In the survey, I asked: in the hypothetical case you would lose your memory, could you list the things you would like to remember? Each of these six images represents what I would like to remember: my partner, my family, my travels, family/friends around a nice meal, where I came from, and my favourite hobby.
  

• Unveil memories. Our brain stores all our memories, waiting to be retrieved. We have flashbacks, memories appear without recalling them. These animations represent all memories stored in the brain.  Digital Memories. I used all my digital photographies (in total 16.758). Since the very first digital image, I took to July 2017. I created an image with all these, using machine learning algorithms to categorize. Each of the six images shows a different theme: Food – People – Landscape – Nature – Buildings – Night.
  

• Non-digital memories.  What does it happen with non-digitally recorded memories? Memories are recreation of what really happened in the original moment. These represent memories only existing on my brain (my first memory, the only tactile one, the awareness of the possible loss of a beloved one, the first time my grandmother did not recognise me…) and how they fade until they disappear. Creating in the process new words.
  

• Collective memories. In the survey, I asked to name the first thing that came to one’s mind related to a theme (a place, a meal, a historic event, a book, a movie and a song). Afterwards, the request was to take some time to reflect on the same themes. The exercise consisted of identifying how the first impromptu differs to the ones that require more time.
  

This piece (from now on P1) is an interactive screen-wall consistent of six 22” monitors. It displays four different representations of aspects of the memory.

A video shows a 2D view of an infographic with all the names visible and a 3D render of the same data. The look and feel are aquatic, reminiscence my birthplace. The process reveals itself as important as the outcome. The dataset was captured manually (by choice). There were cases in which I exhausted the names for a period, so I contacted someone to help me to remember. That created a chain of connections and refreshed old relationships. I could export the full list of my LinkedIn connections (1020) in a couple of seconds. Instead, I copied manually every single name to exercise my memory. This process took several days. I reflected about how the brain works compared to a machine.

The idea for the second piece (from now P2) is an allegorical representation of all the people I met in my life.

The third component (from now P3) is a physical representation of memories: translucid, complex. From the beginning, I decided the final outcome would be displayed in a transparent material. The images were created specifically for this medium. The big one represents all the images stored digitally in a grid mode. The 50x50cm represents images in a cloud model. The other 50x50cm piece shows the negatives and positives of eye detection algorithm… It is really interesting to see how the machine requires adjustments to get accurate results and has a “similar” behaviour as our brain. The human needs to supervise the computer’s outcome for an optimal result. In this piece, both positive and negative results for eye tracking are displayed. The small one shows an early prototype.

The third component (from now P3) is a physical representation of memories: translucid, complex.

P1 consists in an interactive Pi Wall of six monitors connected together. The interaction with the Pi Wall is done with an iPad through OSC communication. Each of the six monitors is connected to a Raspberry Pi 3. Once each of the Pis has been installed and set up (Noobs, ….) Inside each Raspberry Pi the following code has been included: OMX Player and pyOSC… To access to each of the single Pis in an optimal way, I used iTerm to control them in a single view through my laptop.

The installation displays four different animations recorded as videos. That makes a total of 24 different animations. Activated with an iPad that sends an OSC message to the first Raspberry Pi. Pi01 behaves as a master and broadcast the message to the rest. The first Pi has a physical button to reboot the installation.

To avoid real-time performance issues, the computation happens beforehand and was recorded as a video. In the early prototypes, I installed Processing and Openframeworks to run the animations directly on the Pi, but the processor was not powerful enough. Some of the animations have to process more than 16.000 images and this can take quite a time to render and process. Different techniques were used for the animations:

• Retrieve memories. Processing and Shaders to represent the movement. Each photography is divided by colour channel and a white and black filter is applied.
  

• Unveil memories. Openframeworks and tSNE. The animation itself with the blur and the unveil parts are done in Processing, using blend modes.
  

• Non-digital memories. Processing. Each memory is coded as a separated String. At a specified frame rate a character is subtracted randomly creating new words. Until the text disappears completely. To display the background this piece uses a Perlin noise animation. The frame with the photography is created with masks.
  

• Collective memories. Processing, it uses mask, filter and blend modes. All the images from Google based on survey responses and scrapped using Python.
  

P1 - Interactive

The video recorded uses two different infographic representations created using d3.js, a data visualization library based on Javascript. The first one is a 2D representation and the second a 3D version. To render the 3D view, I used Three.js on top of d3.js. In both cases, the infographics are rendered by loading a JSON file that includes all names. In the different prototypes, the JSON was stored locally. I connected the code to an online version stored in Google Drive, so each time the spreadsheet would be updated, this will appear in the rendering.

P2 – Ergo Sum