Showing only Notes + Links tagged memory
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
Art Fag City » The Zoo Art Fair Awards!
On a coffee table in the center of the booth sits a light bulb, lighter, coffee mug, Kleenex box and trucker hat inscribed with the words “Memory is Hunger.” The text refers to the contemporary desire for memory, a lost phenomenon in an age in which everything can be archived. After all, memory only works because it is fallible — it’s a natural means of selection — and as Cory Arcangel once noted in 2000, “All data is created equal.” Today the trucker hat of 2009 is just as important as it was in 2000, or in 1995, or in 1990.
Historiography is the history of history, the aspect of history and of semiotics that considers how knowledge of the past, either recent or distant, is obtained and transmitted.Historiography - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Whereas I would always tear out pages of my diary in frustrated embarrassment when I was young, saving visual memories is pleasant and grounding.
Rachel Hulin, photographer
The artist statement that accompanies Rachel’s nostalgic 20x200 edition released today is what I always wished I knew how to say about my own photography.
Michele Gauler and Eyal Burstein: “Memory Stücks”
Gauler and Burstein (aka Beta Tank) use random objects, most of which are over-sized and impractical, to create a set of unique USB flash drives.
Memory Stücks are a limited edition of memory objects, which bond the tangible physical with the ephemeral digital. Each object has been equipped with USB sticks which carry the digital memories of its object in words, images, film and animation.
(via thedailywhat)
1982+2005, Paris, France, by Chino Otsuka, from Imagine Finding Me: “Images of Otsuka as an adult are craftily combined with snaps of the artist as a child, pinched from the family photo album.”
Faked Photos = False Memories?
I’ve only read the first page of this study, but it looks pretty interesting:
Because image-enhancing technology is readily available, people are frequently exposed to doctored images. However, in prior research on how adults can be led to report false childhood memories, subjects have typically been exposed to personalized and detailed narratives describing false events. Instead, we exposed 20 subjects to a false childhood event via a fake photograph and imagery instructions. Over three interviews, subjects thought about a photograph showing them on a hot air balloon ride and tried to recall the event by using guided-imagery exercises. Fifty percent of the subjects created complete or partial false memories. The results bear on ways in which false memories can be created and also have practical implications for those involved in clinical and legal settings.
(via Coudal)
Gut Memories : The Frontal CortexThis suggests that visual information can be encoded accurately even when one is not paying attention to it -something which has been demonstrated before - and also leads to the counterintuitive conclusion that retrieval of a memory is actually enhanced one’s attention is diverted during encoding of that memory.
Got that kids? So the next time you’re trying to remember something - like chemistry equations or state capitals - do your brain a favor and distract it. (I always told my mom that it was okay to do homework in front of the television - now I have empirical proof, just 15 years too late.) In the book, I give a related example that also demonstrates the power of implicit memory:
The Frontal Cortex : Surgery ChecklistsThe brain is a careless beast. Mostly, I blame my carelessness on the limited capacity of working memory - it can hold seven discrete items, plus or minus two - which means that we’re constantly forcing ideas to exit the stage of awareness. And so thoughts come and go, as we try to juggle the demands of the real world with the feeble processing powers of the mind. For instance, as I was packing for my latest work trip, I went into the bathroom to grab my toothbrush and toothpaste. I grabbed the toothbrush, opened up the drawer to get the toothpaste, but then I noticed all these other things to pack. (Q-tips, deodorant, floss, etc.) The end result is that I forgot my toothpaste.
These cognitive limitations become especially striking when we’re executing complex tasks, like medical surgery. Everything I know about the operating room I learned from Gray’s Anatomy (so feel free to ignore this next sentence) but it does seem like cutting someone open involves an exquisitely intricate sequence of events. The key, then, is to come up with simple tricks that help us compensate for the constraints of cognition. The rest of us have post-it notes and iPhones, but what do surgeons have?
This is why I find this recent study, published in the NEJM, so compelling. Here’s the Globe:
Deaths and complications dropped by an astounding one-third when operating room doctors and nurses completed a simple safety checklist before, during, and after surgery, according to a study led by Harvard researchers.
The eight hospitals that participated in the international study collectively reduced complications during hospital stays from 11 percent of patients before they began using the checklist to 7 percent of patients when using the checklist. Deaths dropped from 1.5 percent of patients to 0.8 percent.“It was beyond anything we expected,” said Dr. Atul Gawande, senior author of the Harvard School of Public Health paper and a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The impact of all the items on the checklist “put together seems to have produced these really remarkable results,” he said.
