Memory Card

“I have always had a phenomenal memory,” a sentiment that I just recently remembered. Growing up I could recite every number in a thirteen string, remember a poem after one read, quote every menial conversation I had ever had. I considered myself cursed and blessed with an elephant’s memory: it made me extremely sensitive to others, often confused and upset when I heard people repeat the same things to me and make the same gestures. Had our interaction not meant anything? Do they not remember me? Now I don’t remember. I lose things. I feel irresponsible with objects and conversations and parts of my life. The funny part about remembering your memory is that it means you’ve forgotten it. What kind of a memory is that? After tackling mountains of old home videos, revisiting birthday cards, story books, terrible essays from high school, my project was conceived: an attempt to reevaluate and reconstruct older memories in my life. At the start of the process I only looked at the past, until I realized – why stop there? In the frame of a found memory card the viewer scrolls through small moments of my childhood, things I can remember, until reaching a point in which it glitches – in which the viewer cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasies of events, as well as the environment they exist in. Past this point, old memories are recreated and explored, lead by a fictionalized older version of myself. However, there is a catch: none of my memories that take place in the future have happened yet. Through the body of a memory card and the small story of a woman who breaks the screen to talk to you, I am curating parts of my past and parts of my future. I don’t intend the piece to seem explicitly about myself, instead, a character that exists within the memory card. She jumps between multiple ages throughout the piece, and wanders aimlessly through her own environments, describing events that happened while leading the viewer through worlds that only become more visually distressed; the piece is intended to age and become confused in narrative as memory does over time. She encounters many visual glitches, pauses, and errors in her world, as she is also grappling with her own relationship to the digital media and film that has captured her, as well as memory’s relationship to error as it accumulates and is stored in the mind. In her world things do not make sense, though the environments exist as fully as any would. With time and exploration colors prevail over specifics, and we find ourselves riding a boisterous wave of sound and place. Where to? Where does it all lead? Well, I promise I’ll let you know when I remember