Medium of Memory
Medium Reflection
Week 1
Images’ voice is limited. It comes from the story behind it but does not always include all the context. How to reflect the information and sensations out of the frame? By reading There is a Name for Women Like my Mother, I see the power of text. The letter written on the photo overlays the memory segments outside of the scene onto the visual record. The text and the image combine and form an artificial space that compresses the time and space where the memory happened.
I was inspired by the idea that bodies are the most direct archive of memories. It is true. If memory is stored in our brains, they are stored in a part of the body. Not all memories can be converted to verbal. The attitudes are rooted in feelings. And feelings are engraved in the bio entity. Some memories flash back with smells, views, and tastes.
Week 2:
Part of the excitement of restoring memories is in discovering new elements that completes or extends the story. AI does this to the Silent Hero. It goes along the investigation path of the artist, and helped him to find the missing piece of the story puzzle. AI may not make strong sense when not directed by the process of human's investigation. The part that AI mixes images by category to address the essense of hero, glory, and death does not make any sense to me. That does not resonated with how I find meanings in archives.
I was inspired by the concept "nostalgia appears to be a longing for a place but is actually a yearning for a different time". Places are transformed by time, too. I have a strong nostalgia and a line in the article describes the desire very punctual.
"revisit time as space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition."
Can making a model of the missed time and space be a plausible way to revisit? Do people enjoy having the nostalgia being triggered? The target of nostalgia can be imaginary. It is a reflection of mindset. Nostalgia is highly personal.
Does techonology shape human's memory system? Do I refer to memory as a system because of my experience of using systemized photo albums?
Medium Reflection:
Time Management Techniques (Whitney Museum, New York)
This show displayed a small collection of photography artworks and outlined their shared attempt: Against immediacy. None of the work marks only the captured moment, besides, they collect clues of more elements out of the frame. Art's outcome-centric tradition is challenged. Artists try to merge the process of making in the final form. Multiple moments are compressed into one single image. The medium experiment is another shared theme among the artworks. One art piece that impressed me was the image recreation of the artist's great grandfather's feet and a recent landscape. The image was made by an enlarger, directly from the two ready-made photos. No new actual scene is involved (the artist did not put the physical photograph of the feet in the woods to make the image). The overlap presence never really happened. It is totally virtual and only exists in people's minds.
Another work draws questions. The artist projected an old photo taken by his father onto a sculpture and created distortion. I was wondering why it was distorted in this way, not another.