Previous Self-Directed Research
Self-Directed Research
I feel like my memory has always been bad. Growing up I didn’t remember much of my early childhood and a lot of things remain a blur to me. I was a weird kid, with weird thoughts. One of my earliest memories was one of me laying in my little bed, probably half asleep, feeling certain about the fact that I was the reincarnation of Jesus (I’m sad to say that as for now, this hasn’t proven itself verifiable).
Memories are a fascinating thing to me. I often catch myself riding my bike or walking and seeing people pass the street, thinking; ‘I want to remember this, this moment, this face, this scene.’. I concluded that I don’t own a mental camera, or if I do it really doesn’t work well; I now only remember that I wanted to remember something, not the actual scene itself.
I often wished my memory would work better, that I could recall certain things more easily. That I would know what is ‘true’ about my memories as a child, and what imagined. Since they are so sparse I hold on to them dearly. In an episode of Black Mirror called "The Entire History of You" the characters have a ‘grain’ implanted, an instrument like a camera that records everything they see and hear, with the possibility to playback any time. As a filmmaker I often wondered if I would like to have the option to record everything. What would it mean regarding my sense of identity, being able to look up all the events that shaped me?
My recent research tends to flow into different subjects closely related to each other. On the one hand it is a exploration of (personal) memory. I’ve been trying to analyse them and de-contextualise them to see what it exposes. They are constructions rather than reconstructions.
“In my early work I pretended to speak about my childhood, yet my real childhood had disappeared. I have lied about it so often that I no longer have a real memory of this time, and my childhood has become me some kind of universal childhood, not a real one” 1
At the same time I try and look at what these personal memory’s mean and what it means to “share” them.
I’m intrigued by our capturing and sharing through algorithms and software. Algorithms that decide when to share. Algorithms that decides for us what our ‘most valuable memory’ of 2017 is. It predicts what we want to share (in image or word) and how we want to share it. Algorithms we rely so much upon that our brains make room for other information.
1. 1996 Christian Boltanski: In conversation with Tamar Garch.