Notes & Links by Casey A. Gollan on
art, design, creativity and technology on
memory

 
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Words by Radiolab

It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But in this hour of Radiolab, we try to do just that. We speak to a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life, and we hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to have the language center of your brain wiped out by a stroke. Plus: a group of children invent an entirely new language in Nicaragua in the 1970s.

Don’t miss the companion film, either.

The painter makes patterns that invite the beholder to project remembered images upon them. The perception of images involves therefore the recollection of visual experience.
E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (via Sam Williams)
Without a memory, EP has fallen completely out of time. He has no stream of consciousness, just droplets that immediately evaporate. If you were to take the watch off his wrist—or, more cruelly, change the time—he’d be completely lost. Trapped in this limbo of an eternal present, between a past he can’t remember and a future he can’t contemplate, he lives a sedentary life, completely free from worry. “He’s happy all the time. Very happy. I guess it’s because he doesn’t have any stress in his life,” says his daughter Carol, who lives nearby.
Joshua Foer, Remember This from National Geographic Magazine
The more capable and multipurpose our tools become, the more the burden of deciding what they do shifts on us. Physical constraints must be replaced by artificial ones, and the effectiveness of our tools becomes an extension of our own willpower and self-discipline. Without these constraints, our devices essentially become amorphous blobs that aren’t really great at getting anything done.

Jack Cheng on Habit Fields at A List Apart

A great article about design, memory, and getting shit done.

See also: Notes on Objectified.

Designers from IDEO: since the invention of the microchip, objects no longer need to look like what their function is. A glass and plastic rectangle can contain the internet.

Karim Rashid on archetypal design: “I have an iPod in one pocket, a cellphone in the other, and I’m on my laptop, yet I go to sit down and the chair looks like a wagon wheel with its wooden spindles!”

H.M., 2009, by Kerry Tribe
double projection of a single 16mm film, 18:30 minutes

H.M. is a two-channel presentation of a single film based on the true story of an anonymous, memory-impaired man, the famous amnesiac known in scientific literature only as “Patient H.M.” In 1953, when he was 27 years old, H.M. underwent experimental brain surgery intended to alleviate his epilepsy. The unintended result was a radical and persistent amnesia. Though he was no longer able to make lasting memories, his short-term recall, lasting about 20 seconds, remained intact. He lived anonymously in this condition for more than half a century until his death on December 2, 2008, in a Connecticut nursing home. His case is widely credited with revolutionizing our understanding of the organization of human memory.

H.M. consists of a single 16mm film that plays through two adjacent synchronized projectors with a 20 second delay between them, so the viewer sees two simultaneous side-by-side projections of two different parts of the same reel of film. The structure of the installation and the nature of the material together produce a sensation of mnemonic dissonance much like that experienced by Patient H.M.

The roughly 18-minute loop weaves together reenacted, documentary, found and animated elements and lies somewhere between an experimental documentary and an independent narrative film.

Hidalgo County, Texas, 1939, by Russell Lee

This retro-futuristic photograph just stopped me in my internet-tracks. It took me a second to put my finger on why, but then I remembered that there was a gigantic print of this image hanging on the wall outside the darkroom where I spent two summers learning to develop photographs.

I’m pretty sure that I will double-take every time that I see this photograph for the rest of my life.

(via Blake Andrews)

The one form of transience the art industry depends on is the transience of memory.
Holland Cotter for The New York Times

Temporary.cc is a website by Zach Gage that over time will disappear and, in the time that it exists, can theoretically never be archived because with every visit it deletes a small portion of its own code, altering a grid like composition of colors on its front page. Lots of beautiful ideas going on.

Please ignore the horrible music/production qualities in the video above, which demonstrates the ideas nicely.

(via today and tomorrow)

Dear Lazyweb: It would be helpful for me to be able to browse my blog in the mind-mappy way of Visual Thesaurus. I know it’s possible but it just doesn’t exist yet or I can’t find it.

A camera you can wear as a pendant to record every moment of your life will soon be launched by a UK-based firm.

Originally invented to help jog the memories of people with Alzheimer’s disease, it might one day be used by consumers to create “lifelogs” that archive their entire lives.

…

“What’s great about these kinds of memory technologies is that they can be very usable for ordinary people,” says Henry Kautz, a computer scientist at the University of Rochester, New York, who works on technology to assist cognition.

“Once you have that mass market, that brings the prices down.” Eventually, he says, a SenseCam-like device could be part of an artificial memory used by ordinary people, just as they use notebooks and planners as memory aids today.

New camera promises to capture your whole life - tech - 16 October 2009 - New Scientist