Blog 4: Making the Remembered Real

The experience of the last few weeks has been quite different from that spent on the project to date. In keeping with a schedule to accommodate other projects, we have been working remotely in the most part, writing and building models. Liam has been leading on the construction of the storyboard, partly due to my time needed on another Analogue project, but also because we are creating an experience centred around autobiography. Where possible we want to root this experience in his memories.

This project has proved eye-opening in what we have learnt about memory. In fact another of our projects centres on this same theme. While with Sandbox we use memory to construct our ‘story’, the other asks what we lose when our memory is threatened. Working on both projects simultaneously in the last few weeks – combined with spending hours alone in a room building miniature washing lines, fences and sheds – has provoked considerable thought to say the least!

In this blog, I intend to update you as standard, but I also feel it important to let you in to some of our discoveries surrounding the process of reconstructing memory. In particular, as the representative in this project who does not own the memories with which we are playing.

Moving forwards: Storyboard
A large part of the last few weeks has been about locating the narrative drive of our work in order to determine what we are trying to say and what we want our audience to experience. The complicated and difficult task of pulling together a storyboard was what followed.

In order to begin adding detail to each point of our audience’s journey, we needed to determine the important areas that would inform the overall experience.

Beyond the over-arching elements to our storyboard, we have also established considerably more detail within each memory, both narratively and in terms of how the audience interacts with each model. This has come out of moving beyond the imagined into building the models.

We are going to fill you in on the storyboard in our next blog once we have had a chance to test some of the conclusions we have reached. Watch this space!

Moving forwards: Models
A big step for us came with our graduation into making the actual models for it provided us with a playground with which we could practically test any interactive possibilities. Of course it is the idealistic and potentially expensive ideas that emerge first but at least that allows us a sense of what we hope to achieve.

It is an interesting process to make a model from someone’s memory. Liam will have had a different experience to mine as he is revisiting something that he at one time experienced, no matter how remote it might feel now. I am using one photograph and my conversation with Liam as my guide. When you have to create something real out of something as unreliable as memory, you really begin to realise how many and at what points the holes surface. Memory will retain something and then other people’s recollections, photographs, stories or a collective nostalgia that has somehow fed its way into the public consciousness, will fill in gaps – when you try to bring them all together, unsurprisingly they don’t always fit.

A good example of this came when I asked Liam where everyone slept in his house in Oberon Way. He had already told me that he, his sister and his mum and gone to live there with his grandparents and uncle. Only when I queried the number of people to the number of rooms was his memory challenged and in further conversations with his mum, he realised that she had to sleep on the sofa to accommodate everyone. He had no memory of this. His recollection has now been made complete (or perhaps unravelled?) by applying an adult logic to a time in his history.

In writing something to accompany a model I was building, there comes another example. After conversations with Liam about what he remembered watching as a child, I did some research into Playschool. He remembered very particular elements about the show as did I. However I have since learnt that some of those elements do not tally with what was shown in the early 80s when we would be watching it as a child. In fact, they were only present in the show as it was in the 60s and 70s. An explanation for this is that the show, which ran from 1964-1988, plays a key part in many people’s memories due to the length of time it was on the air – it is often collectively remembered and as such rather than actually remembering it ourselves we steal other people’s recollections of it and make them our own.

As someone who does not remember the garden of the house personally, there is also something interesting about having only one visual perspective of that space (the photograph taken from one angle at a particular time of day at a specific moment in time) and one interpretative perspective (Liam’s recollection). On top of which, I cannot help but bring my own experience, my own memories of that period – a sense of colour, shade and atmosphere of the early 80s – to the model that I make.

It will be interesting to bring all the models together with the storyboard next week where Liam and I will have the opportunity to experience the reconstructed memories – from the perspective of one who has lived them (or something close) but may not entirely remember, to that of someone experiencing it like an interactive play.

Moving forwards: Technical
It will, in fact, be during the next two weeks that hopefully our interaction with pervasive media will move from something we talk about to something we can play with. Interactive tables are becoming increasingly relevant to our project and discussions with experts in these fields over the last month have yielded many exciting opportunities. However, as Liam said in the last blog, access to a £10,000 surface table is somewhat limited. Therefore we are excited by a few upcoming meetings – suggested and orchestrated by Katie and Claire (Thank you!) – that should see some of these ideas become genuinely integrated into the theatrical/experiential area of our work:

w/c 30th Aug (London) – Meeting with Tim Brooke (Senior Interaction Designer, Nokia)
31st Aug/ 1st Sept (Bristol) – Meeting with Katie (creative feedback) and Dan (Phidgets/ Interactive tables etc) at Pervasive Media Studios.
2nd Sept (London) – Meeting with Tarim (Studio resident/ Technical builder of sensor/ interaction systems)

Much should emerge from these meetings including (we hope!) the building of something that will be used on our test date on 29th September so we will update you on that in our next blog.