From the third version onward, in a still very intuitive conception, Immémorial became a more realistic metaphoric representation of the memorial process. Both poetic and using cognitive illusion, Immémorial simulates the functioning of episodic memory. Different specialists in cognitive sciences have confirmed what I had intuitively guessed. The truth of the memory is not content-related but can be found in the manner of reorganizing, assembling the elements: an interactive story composed of “narrative segments”.
The spectator has to assemble these “signs”. He perceives and interprets them differently depending on their order. Sequences can be cut short or stopped if the spectator chooses to: our memory is not a “hard disk”, but a dynamic function, a meaningful network. Like language, memory is a dynamic system of relations.
Immémorial progresses then as an instinctive, poetic and perceptive-sensorial proposition which deals with the encoding mechanisms of our memories, and which highlights the relationship between testimony, imaginary fiction, and autobiographic narrative. The project, then, elaborates a kind of “ authentictional ” narrative. With this mechanism, I wanted to reveal the infinite potential of associations and emotional junctions.
I thus continued to amass images, sounds, and testimonies in order to compare the images of the first versions with an enlarged corpus, which helps nevertheless to bring to the foreground objects which evoke my own experience of memory.
The interactive installation of the third version of Immémorial is executed on 4 screens. Two pairs of pre-associated sequences are simultaneously displayed on the screens, whereas only one soundtrack is randomly broadcast. By choosing words on the interface-screen, the spectator activates the association of pairs of modules. Words are associated to movies: by choosing words I defined the first databases. It obliged me to organize the segmentation and the recompilation of the audio and visual data. Words appear on the screen inlaid in the image, having randomly been chosen in files containing lists of words.
The spectator can write his own words, which will then be inlayed within the image, directly throughout the interface. The words come back randomly at irregular and longer and longer intervals, as reminding thoughts, like memory tracks of the previous sequences. This third version of Immémorial was created and presented for the conference “About virtual space and body in presence” (University of Auvergne, Le Puy-en-Velay, 2009).
*©Immémorial, PascaleWeber/GMEM/Euphonia/MIM/SCAM/LEEE
