Medialab Prado

MemoryFrames is a recently constructed visual archive of intimate memory with home videos that are exchanged and repositioned in fiction stories to create the recent intimate memory of the protagonists of each one.

It is a virtual staging of the process that forms memory, which is built on the basis of the audiovisual records we make of our lives. The formation of memory is like assembling a film: by joining up the frames, we create a film of our identity.

The Internet, as a space for the confluence of information that connects and is reorganised, allows this process to remain open, making the user the editor of the memories of four characters that are confronting their past for different reasons.

memoryFrames is based on two main hypotheses:

The first is about memory and how it functions on a selective basis. In this intimate reconstruction, we can recognise the elements that belong to dramatic structure, developed by various theoreticians such as Aristotle, Propp, Levi Strauss, Greimas and Joseph Campbell, among others.

The second is the link between image and memory. Visual representation devices, especially those that are derived from cinema, influence not only how we see the world, but also how we situate ourselves in it and how we build our memory. On the basis of this influence, we propose the existence of a common code when reconstructing our memories, thereby making them interchangeable. The notion of memory functioning like a mechanism that goes beyond the distance of time, added to the value of the image as a fundamental instrument in this process, brings us to the idea that the image provides access to the past. The image produces or at least creates the illusion that the past and present co-exist. Images become our memory.

Our objective is also to seek out forms of interactivity that can involve new constructions of meaning based on the recycling of materials and collage, as well as fiction - typical of the experimental cinema of Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. Stories of memories, home videos and short fiction films serve as our support. The result of combining them depends on the user’s choices; it is the user that has to finish closing the connecting links between the character in the story and the memories that appear; it is the user that assembles the story, on the basis of his/her own experience and context.

http://www.memoryframes.org/