Glitching Memories
As a millennial myself, having grown up with technologies such as digital cameras, cell phones and computers around me for most of my life, I fit the description of people addicted to capturing various moments in my life with pictures, and sharing them with family and friends in many different means. The reality is that our memories cannot record everything that we see, our “RAM memory” is just not that great and we are starting to rely on artificial memory to remember visual images and be able to access them whenever we feel the need.
The problem with that is that this addiction to capturing moments in an artificial memory leads us to getting lazier and lazier with the things we do storage in our brains, and we stop enjoying some of those moments as well as we used to. From portable film cameras to selfie-sticks and everything in between is what the 20 years that I’ve been in this world can sum up to when it comes to cameras. That’s how much we’ve invested in making our memories more “clear” by not containing them ourselves. The most common moments for pictures in my family are whenever we are travelling and I realized that my actual memories from those trips are somewhat glitched, becoming clear as I look at the pictures we took. I decided then to glitch some of the pictures I took in recent trips and that have stayed intact due to my computer’s memory RAM in order to represent our deficiency to record those moments clearer without technology.
Each one of the pictures gets glitched in a different way, in the same way that each mental image gets distorted in a different way. A few things are still recognizable such as the Hancock building in Chicago, the waves in Costa do Sauípe, the Empire State in New York, and the upper half of Washington DC. Others are completely unrecognizable until we can access the digital image and compare them, finding resemblances in every corner of it. This was a very interesting experiment for me because as I started I didn’t know if it was going to reflect what I wanted to reflect or not, but it did. The main focus was to show how a few new characters (just like a few years and new memories) can change how you see the image completely. Possibly leading to a fully corrupted image or an erased memory.
