VR Installation
Memory Palace
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Memory Palace reimagines the monument as a digital archive using interactive virtual reality (VR) technology to preserve meaning. It takes its name from the memory enhancing technique whose invention is attributed to the ancient Greek Simonides of Ceos. This memory palace technique, which commonly uses visualizations of a familiar spatial environment, like a building or town, forces us inward to create and store memory images.
This VR portal is inspired by Chloé’s personal video memories captured during her time in Berlin, and explore how we remember by expanding these documented memories into an abstract, interactive world, composed of cut and colorized video, objects, animation, and soundscape. The simplicity of mundane, everyday moments, like the images that might be found in one’s iPhone photo feed, accumulate to show a more nuanced and complex significance.
This project emphasizes feeling, the haziness of a daydream, and a sense of timelessness; mirroring an inability to recollect a memory in its original form. Today’s inundation of information is explored through the densely layered visuals and soundscapes of the audiovisual portal. Fragments of indiscernible information and color compress and change to create perpetually new landscapes. This is an exploration of the ephemerality of memory; how the future flowing into the past becomes an endless production of the past.
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