2007 Rockefeller New Media Foundation Proposal

Abstract

"Memoria/memoi'" is a project about the memory process, how we gain, lose and share memories and how through our senses and emotions we archive, access and change memory over time. The project exists as an interactive installation and website, both serving to collect memories from the visiting audience and relate common threads of experience, drawing the connections between our memories to those of the other viewers, as well as changes to our own memories over time. The memoria/memoir installation begins by gathering personal stories told by visitors speaking into a microphone in a recording booth. Visitors' stories are added to a continually growing database of recorded memory consisting of text, audio and visuals. Once the viewer relays a memory, it is archived into the database and added to the collective memories already stored there. Through the connection of key words linked to each visitor's previously recorded documentation along with other people's stories already within the database, a new series of multi-sensory stories are presented to visitors as they move through the space. The experience is an immersive environment that the viewer both participates in and observes, tying together the larger questions of personal memory, the way we record and remember, and how through the functions of memory consolidation and reconsolidation, memory is mutable and changing over time.