Research Centre
Art and Design Research Centre

Date
2013

Responsive installation (audio/visual)

Memories can be formed around contact with physical objects that populate our everyday lives, we make sense of the physical world by the memories we create. We can create levels of understanding in relation to objects by organising significant memories into stories that hold meaning. The story of an object can involve the story of the personal relationship people have with it, the object can be a trigger on more than one level.

In this project, the physical acts as a bridge to the virtual to provoke memory and sometimes instigate new memory formation in relation to an object. The artefacts of collective digital memory are accessed and rearranged through interaction with objects, the performance of this interaction gives space in which memories and stories about the objects and virtual artefacts can form. Physical manifestations (jars of objects) of meta-data are used to create an unconventional interface to a database of existing memories.

The installation draws on the Flickr database of photographs in real-time for screen based content, the jars are the catalyst for the user's memory and for the software, which searches the database and serves up sequences of images. If a jar is replaced, the screen returns to the user prompt, thus promoting contact and imposing a physical/tactile interaction through the user's period of use.

Researchers involved

Paddy McEntaggart - Senior Lecturer in Interactive Design on the BA Graphic Design

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