Memory and Digital Perception: the Era of Make Believe
statement/ abstract
Memory plays an important role in architecture and begs the question if it is still a ecting the built environment the same as it did 100 years ago? Memory is not the pure nostalgic idea that it used be. Distortions in memory change how the user interface experiences space. Modernism is the first example of Cultural Hegemony which has directly a ected the spaces we built and live in. Counterculture allows society to catch a glimpse of these certain distortions: living examples of the rips in our design fabric. Mass consumerism bred the new nostalgic idea of “the brand” an entity that cannibalizes itself and creates a landscape for our new generations to fester with this bastardized idea of memories.
PURE MEMORY
BODILY MEMORY
Experiential architecture implements sensory and memorable architecture. This requires use of the 5+ senses and a level of purity in the work. “Thick, layered, and constantly oscillating conditions” active the senses and apply temporality to spatial thinking. This space can then be categorized into levels of meaning. “Limitless space into distinct places of human significance.”
These conditions are complex and deeply a ect our living conditions. Three ways memory is used in architecture daily are the following:
1. Preserve the course of time
2. Contain and project memory
3. Inspire us to reminisce and imagine
These principles bring an action to architecture that should be achieved at the highest level. Application of memory through space and time allows the user to connect to something intangible and create a meaningful moment. “My eyes have forgotten what they once saw, but my body still remembers”
Memory = Space Timenth
Mathews
HOUSE-NESS
The purest moments can be related to the places experienced as children. Tree houses and places of imagination harvest the most significant placemaking. The novice builder of a toddler creates the most meaningful spaces based on simple concepts such as light, shadow, sound, and shelter. Imagination of our deep architectural principles open the program of functional items into powerful metaphors. “Deepest meanings of houseness - the full significance of territory and shelter, the metaphysics of inside and out, the symbolism of doors and windows and roofs.”
Door as gateway. Window as daydreaming object. These abstractions of necessary typologies reach at tickling the senses and drawing a line between the house and the imaginary vessel of the treehouse.
House: “a place as much one’s own as a second skin”. Harvesting the program of the house as a second skin as a vessel for creativity and curiosity creates a host for daydreaming. Daydreaming insinuates a certain amount of solitude related to the childhood tree house which hosts upbringing and the solitude of independence
The ‘sacrament’ of the treehouse as a childhood ritual. Stories from the treehouse expand past youth into adolescence and early adulthood. “My image of the building was based at least partly as a tree house I’d has as a child”. Developing these skills to practice as a child help to dissolve our preconception about what buildings look like in adulthood. “It was the tree house itself that these ceremonies commemorated, this airborne room of my own, which I came to regard as a temple of my privacy and independence.”
When developing these connections to imagination and naiveite, there becomes a personal relationship with the work. It develops the built into something with deep meaning and memory. “A house in the first person did not seem like something a third party could build.”
In the Novel “A Place of my Own” the Author Micheal Pollan aims to build a cabin to host his profession as a fictional writer. Novelist turn architect is the true test of purism, plot, and meaning in a building. “Time spent¬ working directly with the flesh of the world is the best antidote for abstraction.”
A PLACE OF MY OWN
The Education of an Amateur Builder Micheal Pollan 1997
Memoir
TREEHOUSE CHRONICALS
One Man’s Dream of Life Aloft
S. Peter Lewis
2008
Art and Photography Document
Maine
THE SENSORY IN ARCHITECTURE
Touch:
The sense of feeling inside a building can cause a thought of either liking or disliking. The art of texture like softness can calm and transform the experience. Touch is to texture that is clothing the space.
Auditory:
Sound can be used to create a sense of place and can be used to evoke memories. Auditory sensation can remind the user of a specific time, or it can bring a sense of emotion over them.
Vision:
Sight is what permits us to view structure, color, and light. Omission of sight such as experiencing darkness makes us quiet allowing an amount of silence. This brings focus on other senses. Being the most accessible and shiny sense vison is most prominent tool to advertise our spaces.
Olfaction:
Smell can be used to create a sense of place and can be used to evoke memories. Scent brings a close interaction with memory. Recalling past times with the sense of smell draws on a deep connection in the brain. The bu et of the smell engulfs the user. Senses of smell can also bring about emotions such as the smell of wood giving o a warm feeling.
Taste:
The sense of taste is the least used sense in architecture, but it can be used to create a sense of place and can be used to evoke memories. Many nostalgic ideas are used in popular culture such comfort foods that bring you back to a specific time and place.
Haven’t you always wanted …?
M@ STUDIO Architects
2016
Temporary Pavillion
Melbourne, Austraila
ART OF SCENT
Diller Scofidio Renfro
2012
Exhibition
MoMA, New York, New York
Hazelwood School
Alan Dunlop Architect Limited
2016
Elementary School of the Deaf and Blind
Glasgow
JAPAN’S ART ISLANDS
Tadao Ando
1980
Naoshima
EXTREMES IN MEMORY
Eidetic memory, known as photographic memory, is the ability to recall an image from memory. It holds stipulations though. It must be recalled with high precision—at least for a brief period—after seeing it only once and without using a mnemonic device. It is proven impossible to have a truly photographic memo-
ry. People with eidetic memory describe the fault of this memory of being more of a jigsaw puzzle than an actual picture. People can remember little things of the past but not the whole picture.
LOST FRAGMENTS-Failed Memories story of mr.wolf
David Szauder 2012
“one day mr wolf wrote down too much numbers. when his memory was decoded the same numbers somehow modified his fragments.”
Alzheimer’s disease is an illness that a ects people for a long time. Where while time increases your memory decreases. It begs the question that If you lose your memory do you lose yourself.
ALTZHEIMER’S ETCHING
Lee Newman Portraits Maryland
FUNES THE MEMORIOUS Funes el Memorioso
Jorge Luis Borges 1942
Short Story Argentina
WHY ENACT THIS IN ARCHITECTURE?
With memory holding such an important role in the distinction of self and formulation of our spaces how might we ensure the stability of this concept. The human brain works as a supercomputer, but with technology having limits so does the brain.
In the short story “Funes the Memorious”, the main character was thrown o a horse and awoke with a consciousness that was “was almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness.” He can perceive every detail and even like a clock constantly know the second of every day. He tries to invent his own language but fails due to the lack of words, not allowing enough detail.
He became so advanced that he perceives decay and is unable to sleep. The knowledge ages him although he is 19, he looks as old as the prophets. He dies soon after. Friedrich Nietzsche said, “blessed are the forgetful for they get the better even of their blunders”.
From the short story, the human body cannot hold the complexities constantly present in the living environment. It is impossible to perceive everything and store it in the human brain. This brings an important program for architecture to do what the human brain cannot.
CATHEDRALS
Study Abroad
Morgan Doherty 2023
Photography
Various European Cities
HOW CAN ARCHITECTURE EVOKE THIS?
As humans we are not able to access memories by will, so we rely on our surroundings to evoke feelings. Enacting the senses in our sophisticated environment remains the only way to bring such important memories to the forefront of our being.
This is possible and happens daily. In religious architecture, theoretically to change our morality and spirituality. These buildings go as far as reinforcing our resolve to be good. Humans are creatures of the senses and should look rather than read when in religion. In many teachings it is seen as healing or rejuvenating just to enter these sacred spaces and doing actions work as repentance for the soul. Thus, bringing you closer to God or spirits and even granting you access to heaven or forgiveness. Spending time in moving or emotional places can make you more of an honorary person emotionally.
Nas House Ro, Stockholm North of Stockholm 1820
METHODS OF DISTORTION
SENSORY ALTERATION
HOW HAS OUR SENSORY COMPLEX BEEN ALTERED IN THE LAST 100 YEARS?
There has been a gradual shift to technology as a coping mechanism in society. Slowly the center of our home has shifted from the fire that keeps us warm to the box that grabs our attention and locks us in. The development of the television demonstrated the sensory trauma in architecture.
Technology and trauma have scientific grounds for correlation. In Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) rapid eye movement morphs memory and perception and space in order to process trauma. This erasure of memory and sensation is happening similarly in negative means the processing of our televisions, cellular phones, and iPads. Through apps like TikTok our attention spans are shrinking, and endocrine systems are being shocked.
Our mobility is changing experience and has shifted to electronic mediated means. The alteration of our sensations has led to a development of an experience economy.
HISTORY CORRELATION
GDP PER CAPITA DURING THE INDUSTIRAL REVOLUTION
Real Wages Increasing Nicholas Crafts and Terrance Mills 1840-1910
GDP Graph Worldwide
Rise of World GDP and wages due to Industrial Revolution resulting in mass transportation and Consumption
Rise of Modernism per No. of eminent architects per million population.
ARCHITECTS IN THE LONG RUN
Gary Stevens 19th Century Plot Chart Europe and Americas
MODERN TRAUMA
Sleek, modernist teachings are individualist perceptions of their past reality and stem from a deep trauma started in the Industrial Revolution. Mass consumption has created a norm of desensitization reliant on purchasing power.
This made way to the repetitive boxes with manufactured pools sitting atop LA’s dry rolling deserts. Nonunique and starved from meaning, Modernism is at fault from a time of spending, consuming, and technology overload when that information gets too much it begs the need to strip down to no information at all.
This is problematic because our built spaces require the pure meaning and memory that we once had. Without it we turn into Funes and crumble under the weight of everything. Our architecture takes the most meaningful ideals and stores for constant rejuvenation of the present.
GLITCHES IN REALITY’S MEMORY FABRIC
The trauma from our past creates distortions in what we know and love, creating alterations of memories and significant moments. These represent glitches. These glitches allow us to identify a crack in society to show a certain shift in the pattern of sensitization. When we slow down from processing and question what we have seen distortions arise much like the Mandela E ect.
The name was coined after political leader Nelson Mandela’s death in 2013. Countless people swore he died when he was held prisoner in the 1980s and distinctly remember news coverage of the funeral.
The Mandela E ect is a commonly held false memory sparking in the 1980s. In the field of psychology, the term “false memory” is applied to anything that a person remembers incorrectly or inaccurately. As such, the term “Mandela E ect” is defined as a false yet widely held recollection.
Furthermore, another popular blimp in society’s memory is from The Empire Strikes Back. This movie debuted in 1980 which also happened to be the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression.
LUKE, I AM YOUR FATHER
Star Wars: Episode V- The Empire Strikes Back
Darth Vader
1980
“No. I am your Father.”
First President of South Africa
Died December 2013
Died 1980s Imprisoned in 1980s South Africa
NELSON MANDELA
POPULAR MAINSTREAM MEDIA
Mandella E ect Test
Logos, Characters, Shows, Brands
MANDELA EFFECT ON MODERN CULTURE
The common distortion of Societies most coveted asset, memory, extents further into other mediums as time progresses. Common examples can be seen to the left. Most of which populate in children’s media as Characters, Television Shows, and Brand logos.
The e ect on Modern Culture is no coincidence. These populate on the living room television while mindlessly eating dinner and on the billboards along the highway. Consumer culture of advertising directly a ects the youth and leaves the consumer questioning years later what was reality?
BYPRODUCT OF BRANDING
Mass Consumption made way for aggressive advertising and desensitization of experience. Thus, making the Experience Economy. Branding strategies fail to establish sensitive connections in today’s landscapes. This makes up the Brandscape. There needs to be an amount of consciousness in society. Without it we become the “culture of the copy”.
The real value of architecture builds experiences from it to create a transformation of the subject. However, with the culture of branding, company competition creates a war of signs with advertisements as the strategy. Billboards and ads become weapons against society.
The intangible is important to our built spaces whereas the tangible can be sold and marketed. “From object to experience” iPad to Architecture there is a shift from the perfection of the object to the transformation of the subject. Commodities are tangible, experiences are intangible therefore they are memorable.
BRANDSCAPES Architecture in the Experience Economy
Anna Klingmann 2010
POSSIBLE QUANTIFICATIONS
MEMORY GAME
It became important to implement self-analyzation through my own experiences. I mapped out my most pure moments associated with memory. Constructing it into a children’s game centered around memory, it became apparent which ideas started to group with others.
The Idea of the ‘Brand’ appeared in what I considered my most pure moments of childhoodmy memory. Shifting and sorting through these became important to how my own memories have been distorted.
ORIGINAL MEMORY GAME
Lazer Etched Bass Wood Popular Nostalgia
CENTERING REALITY
The phenomenon of identifying what is real and reconstructed is a concept familiar to popular culture. In the Film Inception the role of totems works to center your perception of reality. Each character manufactures their own token to act as an anchor reminding them if they are dreaming. Thus, if the totem is incorrectly rendered it will represent a distortion and mean they are dreaming.
Furthermore, in the movie linking the built environment with memory can cause an unsteadiness of what is real and fake. It will cause you to lose your sense of reality. Totems not only represent when distortions are happening but work to counteract the impact.
ANTIQUE PERFUME GLASS Scent and Spinning of Cap
MAL’S SPINNING TOP
Inception
Dominick Cobb
Architect
Continues Spinning
RED LOADED DIE
Inception
Arthur Freeman
Secondary Dreamer
Weighted Die Flips Wrong
MOMBASSA POKER CHIP
Inception
Eames Forger
Mombasa, Kenya, Africa
Chip Multiplies
HALLOWED GOLD BISHOP
Inception
Ariadne
Architect Paris, France
Altered Center of Gravity
REPETITION OF MEMORY
Deja Vu is a term coined by Jamais Vu. This is a phenomenon that happens when someone has already been in almost the same exact situation but does not realize this. The meaning is not totally known but many theories are present today such as increased activity with temporal lobe epilepsy or described as migraines with aura. This phenomenon represents a distortion and repetition in familiar memory.
Literally means “already seen”
- Déjà entendu: already heard
- Déjà éprouvé: already experienced
- Déjà fait: already done
- Déjà pensé: already thought
- Déjà raconté: already recounted
- Déjà senti: already felt emotionally or already smelled
- Déjà su: already known (the knowledge of)
- Déjà trouvé: already found
- Déjà vécu: already lived through
- Déjà voulu: already wanted
In the movie The Matrix Deja Vu is used as a glitch or distortion in the matrix and signals danger. Furthermore, it goes on the acts of simulations which delves deep into the notions of how objective reality has been replaced with subjective tokens or symbols, creating a desertion of the real. The idea of the matrix created a disconnect between the real and hyperreal and intensifies this.
Déjà-Vu
CULTURE OF THE COPY
Quantifying what this does in physical form shows another way memory is abstracted. with human recall. Thinking about a memory and recalling that memory makes a paradox of a memory of a memory. This creates a distortion of what is a real: copy of a copy.
The xerox allows this to be visualized physically through digital mediums.
Furthermore the “Culture of the Copy” brought on by modernism a concept Brandscapes introduced is exhibited. When popular culture is focused on the tangible and recreating the same thing it becomes a ghost of what it has been.
MEMORY OF A MEMORY = WHAT
KIT BASHING DISTORTED MEMORIES
Through gathering used and pre-loved toys, I was able to create a metaphor of my findings with memory. The pure baby doll or stu ed bunny becomes a tool of destruction. This destruction is manifested by mechanical moving parts which aim to take over the purity of the object. In some causes it gorges the eyeballs out of the bunny or decapitates the baby doll, all in violent and deliberate ways.
Kit Bashed Found Used-Toys
Technologies Distortion on the Pure
Kit Bashed Found Used-Toys
Technologies Distortion on the
BUNNY CYBORG
BABYDOLL CYBORG
BUNNY CYBORG Kit Bashed Found Used-Toys Technologies Distortion on the Pure
BABYDOLL CYBORG Kit Bashed Found Used-Toys Technologies Distortion on the Pure
INTERCONNECTIVITY OF IDEAS
This web displays the complex interaction between all the terms mentioned and elaborated on. These connections are limitless and unnumbered. Some of which are shown here.
MEDIUMS OF APPLICATION
MEDIUM OF MEMORY
Jacques Benveniste a scientist researched water retaining memory saying it was “a homeopathically diluted remedy through his allergy test, returning a positive result. Only molecules of water, and no molecules of the original antibody, remained in these high dilutions. the configuration of molecules in water was biologically active”. A journalist coined the term water memory for this hypothesis.
Passing through multiple phases and beings it remembers its molecular structure and being. This locates the territory of these memory centers on important bodies of water.
THE GREAT SALT LAKE Utah, United States of America Lake
Everglades National Park, FL
United Stated of America
Wetlands
EVERGLADES
MEDITERRANEAN SEA Italy Ocean
APPLICATION OF TREATMENT
Memory Treatment centers populating on large bodies of water in major metropolitan cities aim to counteract the trauma and distortion of the last 100 years. These are aimed to work against the generational trauma of false, distorted memories of mass consumerism for the betterment of our population and built spaces.
This architecture would work to help the fabric of this distortion on the population in hopes to inspire new spaces. Furthermore, it would show an example of how current-day architecture can achieve this. Thinking only of ‘modern’ architecture as a movement of the past
LAKE NEUCHATEL
Swtizerland Lake
NILE RIVER Egypt, Africa River
ARABIAN SEA Yemen, West Asia Ocean
MASS TERRITORY
This architecture could hope to achieve this in three ways stated early in the literature. Taking these on as programs to illicit successful and memorious buildings in specifically chosen sites.
1. Preserve the course of time
2. Contain and project memory
3. Inspire us to reminisce and imagine
NIAGRA FALLS Ontario, Canada
YANGZTE RIVER Jingzhou, China Asia River
AMAZON RIVER Brazil, South America River
LAKE MICHIGAN Chicago, Illinois United States of America Lake
PROPOSAL
Memory plays an important role in architecture and begs the question if it is still a ecting the built environment the same as it did 100 years ago? Memory is not the pure nostalgic idea that it used be. Distortions in memory change how the user interface experiences space. Modernism is the first example of Cultural Hegemony which has directly a ected the spaces we built and live in. Counterculture allows society to catch a glimpse of these certain distortions: living examples of the rips in our design fabric. Mass consumerism bred the new nostalgic idea of “the brand” an entity that cannibalizes itself and creates a landscape for our new generations to fester with this bastardized idea of memories.
CONCLUSION
STORAGE COMPLEXITIES
STORAGE COMPLEXITIES
UNRELIABLE ASSEMBLIES
FICTIONAL CARRIERS
MEMORY INDEXICALITY
MEMORY FORGERY
SPATIAL MEMORY
SPATIAL MENTAL CONNECTIONS
SPATIAL REMEMBERING
SOCIETAL INDICATOR
SOCIETAL INDICATOR
UNTRUSTWORTHY BEINGS
PIXELATING COLLISIONS
SOCIETAL INDICATOR
AFTERWARD
DEDICATION
APPENDIX
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