'''Lotte's 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.’, whilst making a ‘mental picture’ in my mind. Sometimes even putting my fingers in the shape of a frame and making a clicking sound, like you see people doing in movies. 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?

For the self-directed research I continued the ideas I was working on last year concerning memory and the digital. These have related subject that I worked on. I’ve been collecting and experimenting a lot with different forms of expression. It hasn’t become a concrete work yet.

Future Memory

I was thinking about how I could visualise the predictive nature of communication through social media like WhatsApp. I collected my frequently used emojis over the past 3 months. With autoscript I generated ‘future diary’ entries my phone would predict. In the green screen studio I made some video’s of ‘life’ emoji’s like aubergines and peaches (very meaningful emoji characters).

Memory on Stock
 Memory on stock is an idea I thought of during the Utopia / Dystopia project. Starting point is the future of generative memory. What is a memory worth if you don’t have images with it that are not yours. How does stock footage take over the story and what is the meaning of the image in that sense.

It’s in many forms a construction. The construction of a memory, the construction of a story. But it’s gonna be a voice over with found-footage (archive, stock-footage, screen-recordings.. Might be some shot footage in there as well). The images must feel as a construction for as the voiceover, person who’s narrating, will be shifting between different aspects of the story).