Date of Award
Spring 6-4-2022
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Digital Media
First Advisor
Shona Kitchen
Second Advisor
Max Pratt
Abstract
In the fall of 2020, during the first week of graduate school, I crashed on my road bike and suffered a big-time concussion. Like, lost-consciousness-and-forgot-the-whole-day kinda big. I became obsessed with this permanent memory deletion. Trying to remember the event was like trying to remember the first time I saw the color blue. Impossible without supplementary data or second-person observation.
Memory recall can operate like a game of telephone. When we remember something, we’re really just remembering the last time we remembered it. We accrue subtle adjustments to our memories that result in gradual omissions and distillations.
This process lost a comparison between human and machine. Each transference of data or memory results in a loss: of quality, of clarity, of precision. The more we redistribute data, the more bits we lose. The further we move away from a memory, the less we can remember. The compression of an image results in imperceptible losses and drop frames. The compression of the brain results in imperceptible losses and drop frames.
If our memory acts data – eroding with time, wiping unexpectedly at a moment’s notice, how do we immortalize it, beyond the capability of deletion?
Here’s a few pages of memories that have remained.
Recommended Citation
Lindon, Margaret, "I don't quite remember it that way" (2022). Masters Theses. 847.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/847
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Comments
View exhibition online: Margaret Lindon, I don't quite remember it that way