Project description

Memory Traces
Project Brief


Shih-Mei Lee
Pablo Martinez-Zarate



General Description of the Project


Memories invade social spaces. Either historical facts or personal and immediate needs, remembering and forgetting are constitutive elements of social activity. Human history emerges from this interplay between remembering and forgetting, and communication media play a protagonist role in the preservation of collective memory.

Cyberspace, as a realm constructed upon human interaction, allows the embedding of personal memorabilia into public space. Passions and fears are digitised, made public while tracing emergent territories, superposed to geographical ones. In our project, we intend to trace this collective publication of personal experience through digital channels. On a theoretical level, our work represents an incursion into the historical experience of digital media. The two aspects of memory taken into consideration are time and space, so the practical outcome should display this dichotomy.

On the one hand, because as Lisa Gitelman writes, the relationship between “publication and events-made-public is not transparent but is crucial to the experience of media in time and therefore in history”1. Let us compare, says Gitelman, the ‘liveness’ of a TV broadcast versus the ‘real time’ of the Web. As opposed to the external dependance that television and radio have with their audience and the events transmitted ‘live’, ‘real time’ constitutes an intrinsic quality of data streamed through the Internet. A concert or football match live casts have programmed end-times, whereas the Internet is continuously updated, and reproduced, by its users. Recording and performance happen simultaneously. The Internet, under this perspective, could be understood as the live recording and projection of human experience.

Moreover, photo albums, which are themselves a representative object of the relationship held by post-industrial societies with time and space, have found a new domain of visibility and mobility through technological mediation. We do not only show our pictures to our family or friends on the living room anymore, but also construct visual narratives of ourselves through uploading information to the web.

In practical terms, in our project we intend to explore a cartography of this digital memory spaces. Our objective is to compose a dynamic archive of media, including mainly texts and images, harvested from a user generated content site such as Flickr. The system will store and update information appertaining users’ everyday remembering or forgetting, and will display information related by users to forgetfulness or oblivion.

The strings “I remembered . . .” and “I forgot . . .” will be searched in Flickr, and the results archived in a database. These strings will have a geo-referenced image associated to them. The data will be visualised in terms of those words (objects or situations) related by Flickr users with “I remembered” or “I forgot”. In our system, the user can click on the word that interests him and get redirected towards a bank of images. Clicking on each image would take you to the original context of that item in Flickr.


Design Prototype

The work done so far has been reported in our blog (http://xyztspace.blogspot.com/). Our first attempts included a travel map of Edinburgh or audiovisual narratives of the city. But after a long time of debate, we decided to build a web-based project, with possible variants for the day of final presentation.

The design of the interface tries to visualise the process of our development and also aims to fit the idea of tracing our own memory of doing this project. From the very beginning, the visual style suggests a feeling of worn out by use, of the pass of time. We decided to display a silhouetted landscape of Edinburgh and make a combination of words as background.

Functionality:

Firstly, a simple image is used to integrate the content of Memory Traces project, including:

* I forgot/I remembered website (now it is a prototype)
* A proposal
* A link to the documentary of our working process (Memory Traces blog, http://xyztspace.blogspot.com/)
* Acknowledgments

Additionally, this interface might be used to brand the project and the size of the interface might have to adapt for the high screen resolutions display (the minimum is 1024*768).

The first screen: a dialogue

Starting from two sentences: I remembered and I forgot. The logos floating on the screen are some popular social networking sites or user-generated contents. The dotted background and intertwined line are trying to show that they form a massive informative space. Two dialogues are the initial options for the user to navigate through this digital memory space.(PS: All the logos are used in here belong to their respective owners.)

Second screen: generating the most popular terms from the digital memory space

Initially, the film-reel like bars are created to display the most popular terms in the horizontal axle. However, I found too many search results from the site like Flickr or Twitter. Therefore, I add some note-like images to display the most popular words/phrases, such as I forgot my passwords or wallet. This note-like images could be used not only to represent what things are most forgettable, but also a sub-menu for the user to go into a particular sentence or a phrase. In order to make the screen more interesting, the two large screens basically can be used to show pictures chosen by the designers, rather than generating automatically from the database.

The third screen: mash-up all the data related to a certain phrase

In here, a simulated interface outlines a mash-up of images regarding the term matching the words 'I forgot umbrella'. Ideally, all the photos can display randomly on the screen to give a roughly overview of the people narrating their common memory. In the final version, we might include a geobased search of popular terms, if the interface allows it.



Ideas for Final Presentation

While trying to define the interaction of the user with our interface, that we consider a fundamental element, we decided to project the images on a touch screen, which will allow a more dynamic interplay with the piece. After uploading the project to the Web, we might include a search box for personalising queries or fields of search for the images. Drawing inspiration from projects quoted in our blog, such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s projections on facades, or those by Edinburgh City Council in Old Town, we might include a projection in the Atrium or some building in Edinburgh.

Next Steps and Final Notes

The next step in our project is developing the automated part of the design. We are meeting with our tutors next week to start working on the API and how to incorporate it in our own design. The final details should be defined by week 8, so we can dedicate the last week to adjusting possible setback or malfunctioning.