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Flax, Carol

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As an artist, I try to find those delimiting spaces where the personal and the social come together, where boundaries shift and nothing is quite certain. As an adoptee, I have spent most of my life caught in the transitional state between knowing and not knowing. For years my work has broached questions of uncertainly in my own identity, extended outward to include larger issues of social and cultural identities. I have used various strategies, sometimes working in the intense private realm, sometimes in the vulnerable and exposed public domain, and various approaches, from my early computer-altered print work in the mid-1980's to more recent web, multimedia and installation work. In each of my projects, questions of memory, both personal and cultural, help to shape my approach.

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Recent Submissions

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    2007 Rockefeller New Media Foundation Proposal
    Flax, Carol (2009-03-30T16:05:09Z)
    "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.
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    2005 Rockefeller New Media Foundation Proposal
    Flax, Carol (2007-01-12T14:50:38Z)
    This proposal for the New Media Fellowship is in support of a dynamic project, memoria/memoir, which will be realized as both an interactive installation and website. The website is currently in development and this proposal is in support of the installation, which I intend to begin production on in spring 2005. Among other things, memoria/memoir is a venue for current research in Artificial Intelligence learning capabilities, on-going research into the workings of human memory and an exploration of non-keyboard interfaces for computer input and output. Working with collaborators in digital arts, electrical and computer engineering, neuropsychology, computer science, and composition and sound design, I am in the process of creating a complex arts and sciences interdisciplinary collaborative research project, which connects machines with human intelligence and memory with visual and aural symbols.