For my third and final artefact I had to look at memory. When researching this area in my workbook I looked most closely at the psychological approaches to memory, and how these are seen in different medias.
I was most interested in the forgetting part of memory- how much stays with us over the years, and how much fades away due to its lack of significant effect on us ,or our own lack of rehearsal of the information.
This is the area I decided to look at more closely and create my artefact around. I decided to look at people’s long term memory. I wanted to see even after many years, people can still remember what places used to look like, as the type of things that people pass everyday are usually only shallowly processed and so not memeorised deeply in the mind.
To do this I decided to find images of Coventry from the 50s and 60s, I then went to the same places and took pictures showing what they look like today. I then asked someone who had lived in Coventry during the time of the original pictures, and who still lives in Coventry today to look at the images I took recently and annotate them to say how much of the scenary had changed. By comparing their annotations to the originals, I would be able to tell how much of the world around them back in those days they had remembered, and therefore processed deeply.
I found that the person I asked to annotate these photos could remember the most significant changes between now and then but did not offer any smaller, subtle changes. However this finding is only relevant to the one person I asked. Others may well remember more, less or even different changes that have occurred.
If I was to expand upon this project then I would use a wider selection of people, this would not only add to the artistic value of my piece as there will more images, but also it could be used as a simple psychological experiment about the duration of long term memory/ level at which we process our everyday surroundings. I could also include a sevaral towns and cities, showing variety of people’s memories around the country as well as showing how much different places have changed in the last decades.
I could also improve upon this piece by making it more of an instillation piece- maybe having people describing what used to be there, or even using archive moving images and modern film mixed in with the images; this would give more variety to the piece, as well as allow me to use a whole range of different medias.
