"What would it look like to build a planetarium of one's own?"
— Sarah Sze
I myself have "made" a portable planet. My son, Elliot PDS-70b Rosenberg Skaff, is known to all as LP, for "Little Planet." I have snapped approximately 15,435 photographs of him in 4 years. 1,343 videos. 251 audio recordings. I can access almost all of these documents on a tiny computer I keep in my pocket. When I examine the files, what do I remember -- the moment, or the archive of it?
The answer is even more ephemeral when asked of my son, whose bank of memories is 10 times less full than mine, but the same amount more dense -- a day of his life is like a year of mine.
"...if we try and remember one thing that happened to us when we were, let's say, 10 years old. It's very hard to remember even what happened in that year. And for me, I can think of maybe one, maybe two, and that one moment has expanded in my mind to fill that entire year. So we don't experience time in minutes and seconds. So this is a still of the video that I took, printed out on a piece of paper, the paper is torn and then the video is projected on top of it. And I wanted to play with this idea of how, in this kind of complete immersion of images that's enveloped us, how one image can actually grow and can haunt us."
Is it possible, to build a memory for another person? A family member, a friend, a total stranger? Could you create visuals that would be universal enough to be recognizable to all, but specific enough to be archived in the mind not as image but as memory? What framework would be needed to contain and deliver the imagery? What other inputs would be needed to forge embed within an existing neural pathway?
Could one enlist the viewer's friends, family members, long lost acquaintances, to seed the concept into fertile mental soil? Or could you draw upon a public inventory -- internet images of locations, times, objects, personal history. Pull from social media and google street view and high school yearbooks? What would be the contemporary experience for the viewer? What would be the result?
This is a world played in by Derek del Guadio and Chris Marker, David Blaine and Christopher Nolan. David Eagleman has studied the phenomenon. Sarah Sze's work interprets the experience of memory, and maybe tangentially her own memory. But could you imprint the memory of others?
La Jetee
Inception