A picture to forget
TouchDesigner, Arduino, Desktop, Webcam, Mouse, Water Pump
Certainty Expo _V2, Rotterdam 2019
The goal of this interactive installation is to stimulate thinking and reflection
about the photo-taking-impairment effect, how we use photography
to enhance and protect memories in order to fabricate personal life experiences,
and how it negatively impacts our memory by being a cognitive offload.
INSTALLATION
The experience is thought in the form of an interactive installation.
The interaction elements of the work are: taking a photo and attempt to save it,
while it slowly disappears. The participants are exposed to the process of memory
decay by showing how the initial image is being decomposed.
The visualisation of the disappearing of memory is inspired by biological decay,
digital distortion and glitch, where the memory bits are shuffled and reorganized.
It decays slowly and disappears in the end.
EXPERIENCE
The experience takes approximately 1.5 minutes.
In the first phase, the visitor is exposed to a message that provides framing to the installation.
It suggests the user to take a picture using the mouse. The visitor is seated in the front of a desktop computer,
keyboard and mouse.The first mouse click, which is the one to take a picture from the webcam,
initializes water droplets falling onto the keyboard. Each drop that touches the computer keyboard,
advances the process of disappearing of the picture. The user is encouraged to "save" the memory from decaying,
but random movements of the mouse, make it impossible to click on the save button.
The water is the damaging force of the device that serves both as generator and storage for the image.
This is a representation of the passing times and events that make memories disappear.
Finally, the images is totally unrecognizable,and the user is exposed to the classic blue screen of death,
which clearly implies the failure of saving the given memory.
The video below illustrate the working of the installation
This project was developed in collaboration with Joanna Mania and Maarten De Bruijn for the course "Statement to experience,
Semester project" during the Media Technology Master's and was exhibited during Certainty Expo at _V2, Rotterdam 2019
