Thursday, March 8

Memory-Graphs

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Sometimes an instant is all you have, but it can be enough to make a memory-graph. Huh? A memory-graph is like a photograph, captured wherever it is that our brains store visuals. And they're imperfect duplicates right from the start. Worse yet, they're in motion, shaken and shaped by time, and compressed by other images crammed in around them. Colors bleed from nearby piles of storage and the weight of the things as we age cause them to go misshapen.

Should we do an archeological dig into the storage layers we could uncover things which are themselves images of layers of things. For example see this murky scene? There's an 18th century steeple, and a carriage house on the right from the 19th century. The scrawl? From the late twentieth century. Oh, and there's a car in there somewhere from somewhere in the 2000s. Imagine a scientist some two thousand years from now unearthing this scene. Could she spot the nuance of cultures here? Or would she figure that colonialists were upset with their police?

You could pardon her the confusion, but who will pardon us when we examine our memory cache... to discover the squiggly memory-graphs we use to guide us? Graphs which warn us, tease us, or direct us as we make decisions which propel us even farther away from the time we captured the things. And which cram even more information into the dense areas of where our personal recollections are stored.

1 comment:

Andreas said...

Ted,

you will love Rome! I have never seen a city that's so incredibly layered. There is everything from more than 2000 years, and it is there all at once. It is the single most astounding city in the world. You'll love it and you'll get back over and over again.

Interesting, that I never made photos there ...

Andreas