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.

Comments

View exhibition online: Margaret Lindon, I don't quite remember it that way

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