I’m in the middle of reading a book by Steven Pinker, one of my favourite thinkers and linguists. The book, “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Thought”, looks at the way language affects and shapes our views of reality. How we describe the world through geography, thus we have terms such as “under the ground” or “under the sea”. The geography of linguistics defines our perceptions of the world around us. To use the book’s own argument to prove a point, language helps us navigate our world.
It was with ideas of realities and perceptions swirling around my head that I visited DIGITAL CAROUSEL last week. The exhibition was a collaborative installation by students from DCU’s MSc Multimedia. Comprising of two projections, the show was one of the more engaging exhibitions I’ve seen recently. One one side of the space we are presented with an analogue slide projector unceremoniously rotating to its own beat every ten seconds, throwing up for consideration various vintage slides: Still vignettes, their colours fading, remisicent of times gone by. Running in parallel to this was a larger digital video projection of a computer desktop running a plethora of tasks, primarily taking these images and animating them in alternately humourous and poignant fashions. To all of this was added an audio piece consisting of sounds, songs and other auditory wonders. A visitor couldn’t help but immediately feel as if they were intruding on someone’s memories.
According to the show’s press release: “The concept of the project is to build a link between an event as it actually happened and the event as it is remembered. The analogue projection is a record of the event. The digital projection is a representation of how the event is perceived or imagined.” The group was certainly successful in its aim. The confusing nature of memory is visualised and presented in a unique and striking way. Their choice of media is certainly apt. The use of analogue slides to represent the actual event highlights analogue’s triumph over digital, in sound as in image: the actual light from the event is recorded. Part of the reality is captured in the image. Digital’s capturing fails in its inherent method of catching a moment; all it can present is a digital pixelated approximation of light. The lossy nature of digital capturing echoes the lossy nature of our memory. Our memory, rather than preserving a reality, merely copies it, and invariably gets a few things wrong along the way. Thus memory creates a reality, albeit one similar to the one is seeks to emulate...
