MIT Media Lab Personal Statement (Accepted 25’)
“All things are engaged in writing their history…Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. The ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal.”
I wish to investigate how a decentralized memory network made up of individual memory triggers embedded within everyday objects can create a future in which no one will be forgotten because there is no central point of forgetfulness. My research will be built upon my personal experience surmounting grief, my professional experience in the craft industry in Japan, and my passion for using interactive media to postpone being forgotten, which some cultures regard as a second death. I wish to document, archive and create persistence for the “collective memories” of everyday objects so that ordinary and extraordinary humans can be remembered by their loved ones and history through the objects they have left behind.
The motivation to embark on this research came from processing the grief from the unexpected loss of my close friend and collaborator Ralston Louie who once asked me why anyone would care about my grandmother’s personal story before helping me digitize her memories in art. The same question resurfaced while I was co-directing Ralston’s unfinished MFA thesis, Wing Wor, a journey in search of his ancestral home. My team and I searched through his scripts, interactive prototypes and lidar scans of his ancestral village for a universal theme that could make meaning out of his absence. Ralston’s memory is stored across these digital remains, and it became our job to curate and find hidden meaning in them.
Seeking inspiration, I returned to Greece to re-climb the same mountain Ralston climbed on his 27th birthday and found myself experiencing the startlingly clear presence of my friend, felt at the turn of a corner or ahead of me on the path even though we were no longer sharing the same physical world. I felt Ralston’s presence so vividly because the path carried his memories along with my memory of him. The experience is akin to Thomas Hardy’s poems, “stretches of path can carry memories of a person just as a person might of a path.” Climbing the Greek mountain ranges is like traversing through the digital landscapes Ralston left behind. In both instances, following his footprints opened the gateway into the in-between space, between the digital and the physical, where his memories reside.
I believe our memories of Ralston can be stored within the digital environments, soundscapes, and objects in a virtual scene. When we interact with those digital objects that hold the memories of my friend, they become powerful memory triggers. We built Wing Wor around this fundamental belief and the interactive mechanics of developing a photograph, sweeping an ancestral tomb gave family members and strangers alike an embodied way of remembering Ralston. The project was nominated for Best Student Game and featured at the Games for Change festival. Co-directing Wing Wor with my team and witnessing the Louie family’s emotional reaction as they felt their son’s presence helped us through our grieving process.
To further my research in memory triggers and physical time capsules, I traveled to Japan to work with the Kyoto craftsmen carrying centuries of tradition. As a way of documenting their craftmanship, they used something called ‘hakogaki,’ signed records of the craftsmanship process and ownership history etched onto wooden blocks. But today most of its significance is lost to the flow of time. We need a new capsule, one that is effective in triggering memories: I proposed a “Digital Hakogaki” embedded within the craft itself.
With the craftsmen, we crafted a digital textile by training our gen-AI on 20,000 traditional textile patterns. Not only does this digital textile carry the provenance of Kyoto craft, but it also carries the memory of its holder represented by its evolving color and pattern. Then we trained a generative adversarial network on the physical textile’s weaving pattern and its corresponding weaving structure so the digital textile can be “forged” into a physical textile.
For the Digital Hakogaki to become an effective memory trigger, its physical material must become dynamic. Hiroshi Ishii’s research on Radical Atoms demonstrates how “materials that can change form and appearance dynamically” have the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with digital objects. Inspired by Behnaz Farahi’s project Caress of the Gaze, I see the impact of programmable materials to reshape personal identity in relation to space and those around us. Building on this inspiration, I envision the Digital Hakogaki crafted with programmable materials layered onto everyday objects in the form of digital textiles. These materials would evolve physically over time to embody the memory they hold. When it’s time for Targeted Memory Reactivation, as explored in Pattie Maes’ research, each material would reset to the state it was in during the memory event, creating a network of memory triggers.
Under the mentorship from the principal investigators of Tangible Media, Critical Matter and Fluid Interfaces Groups, we could develop a system to program digital memory triggers that physically interact to reconstruct collective memories. I seek to learn from the ongoing TMG research and contribute to projects like Mirror Fugue that achieves “TeleAbsence”. Through CMG, I aim to empower the craftsmen of our generation with programmable materials. Under the FIG, I hope to develop a generative AI model for crafting digital mementos. By embedding memory triggers within everyday objects, more of us can seek solace in the memories that reside within our everyday lives—keeping the narratives alive and postponing the second death not just for my friend Ralston or the craftsmen but for all humankind.
