avad | Entries tagged with memory

dc_limitless_6, a photo by avaDarlene on Flickr.

Darlene Charneco artworks featured in the film 'Limitless' about augmented memory.

if you catch the new film 'Limitless' about artificially enhanced memory, keep an eye out for my large mixed-media Petri dish piece 'Islands of Common Interest' in it. there is also a glimpse of a grid of my babypieces nearby and a row of 12" works on mapping and memorypalaces... see rest of set. All to do with experiments and the evolving collective and connective memory...:)!

A 'Limitless' memory?' - article on MSNBC

catalog: Darlene Charneco: Self-Assembling MemoryPalace

some things coming together now....making more sense....

memorymarkers on my art...in flickr
points and notes....embedded links...weaving things together
Rivers piece evolving/deepening.....
http://www.flickr.com/photos/avadarlene/4525802294/

Local Community Development and education
Center for Water Studies
Second Life

but how to present??? computer set up near installation? need to explain in text as well. not much time!!!

something about the object and the virtual...the buying and logging in...like the dolls.
so each person has a memoryobject (need new word)to work with....online I can have a version of this object with my own notes....and then they can create their own collections of links/info/photos to embed as well.
A reading object...that holds information in a different way. accessible visually and by touch.
a RE:MINDER.
Arecibo
how can/should this be done in exhibition?
Mundillo
weaver....linking all things together...making passageways and mirrors through all photos, people and pages
and then mapping all the artworks into a larger map/pieces....
as I was starting to see with the circles....being larger zoomworlds of the nailheads.

am also so excited to have new panels, thanks to Paul R. more circles than I had expected/ordered. but I guess it is meant to be.

childhood memories

what is a favorite comforting smell for you? something that soothes you whenever you smell it? perhaps all the way from childhood or not.

for example, the steam of cooked white rice really soothes me. whether it's my own or just opening the box from the chinese food place and the steam wafts out. I breathe it in intentionally....reminds me of home I guess.

( comforting scents(collected from friends) )
please add yours!

just finished reading 'The Emperor of Scent'. I first picked it up at Borders and became completely engrossed. Thrilled when i found it at the library. LOVEDLOVED the portions which explored in depth the mystery of scent with details and descriptions of various mixtures and historic perfumes, but grew very impatient with the drawn out scientific community politics and personality battles surrounding the theory (which unfortunately was given priority focus in the ...book- just not interesting to me). I'd like to take out my favorite pages and make a smaller pamphlet on scent and memory.
Read the first pages: here

http://www.amazon.com/Emperor-Scent-Perfume-Obsession-Mystery/dp/0375507973

stopped at the library after work, and sat there to finish reading that book so I could finally return it and leave with another bag full of books, mags and films. A new book by Diane Ackerman, and one on The Age of Empathy...more on perfume/scent, foreign films. libraries=endorphin rush for me. mmmm mmm yeah♥

A favorite passage from the book I'm reading, In the Palaces of Memory by George Johnson.:

"In trying to explain how difficult a problem neuroscience still faces, Cooper likes to tell a story.: Suppose you came here from another planet. You have no eyes, no ears, just infrared sensors to help you get around. You notice that an object is thrown on your doorstep every morning. But you are not equipped with the concept newspaper. You subject this strange artifact to physical and chemical analysis. You weigh it every day and see that it goes from thin to fat in seven-day cycles. You analyse the ratio of black to white and find that it is fairly constant. You note that the chemical composition of the paper sometimes changes. But in understanding what a newspaper is, much of tht turns out to be irrelevant. Will you, the alien, ever make the leap and somehow realize that on the surface of the paper are rows and rows of tiny markings, that they cluster into patterns that carry information? And, if you are someday driven to make this radical hypothesis, is there any hope that you will learn to read the thing?"....

well put in the flickr blog:

Many hands make light work

"Have you ever tagged someone else’s photo? I know I have. A describing word, or perhaps even two joined together; a ‘lasso’ to group photos together from an event; identification of a subject in the photo; a colour; a season…

All that work that we’ve put in has contributed to making something greater than the sum of its parts: an organic information system, derived of descriptive words and phrases made entirely from individual contributions. You can see what’s going on in the world by watching hot tags fly by on our main tags page. You can even see what’s going on now in some of the bigger cities in the world on our new Places pages. All thanks to the determined effort of you, you nerdy taggers, you.

There are about 20 million unique tags on Flickr today. 20 million! They are the bread and butter of what makes our search work so beautifully. Simply by association, tags create emergent collections of words that reinforce meaning. You can see this in our clusters around words like tiger, sea, jump, or even turkey.

What if we could lend this wonderful power to some of the huge reference collections around the world? What if you could contribute your own description of a certain photo in, say, the Library of Congress’ vast photographic archive, knowing that it might make the photo you’ve touched a little easier to find for the next person?

Well… you can. ..read more

Dreams: visiting my grandmother's old home/building in the Bronx...and seeing it strangely deteriorated...as if eroded by time(ages)....the roofline (of all the buildings on the street) jagged, the windows open and glassless and full with mud/sand.

'Real Life':
thoughts on memory and space again.

visited a gallery I'm looking forward to showing in (art + architecture) and spoke with the owner for a long while about all sorts of things...including memory palaces and virtual worlds. She's planning out the next year of exhibitions and wants to do something with me.:)

Finally a full studio day today...painting on a new set of 12" circle pieces....in the studio and at the kitchen table...mappings and water. I need long stretches of time to really fall IN to the ideas..to this other realm. Wish i could just be a hermit for a while with no other responsibilities..and let this all blossom.

also playing with the paper beads again...with pinheads they become people...tiny little dolls in ethnic-looking dress...and this seems so strangely right too. I am reaching in my mind to Uganda and want to SEE...so I go load up Google Earth and fly around. Cannot see Gulu...but then nearby I find a clear section and zoom in...I fly around the farmland and clear land...and happen upon a strange pattern...which extends very far...thousands of little earth colored bumps..??...which i later find to be

huts in a huge camp for displaced persons....
:(!!
this sinks in differently now...the scale of it.

and I am there in shapes and thoughts...mixing materials, combining stories...of where everyone is and what is happening right now here and there and everywhere at once.

"This an amazing talk about brains and brain theory from the guy who invented the PalmPilot. Totally worth 20 minutes of your life."- Jordon of cogsigh.blogspot.com

agreed. and I actually think I may be a bit in love. there's something so thrilling about an absurdly rapid yet completely comprehensible speaker on a topic of major personal interest. My heart was beating faster and I want to be him and eat him at the same time. that's love on your planet, right?;)

on universal impulse I find myself looking for a good excerpt from The Evolving Self (one of my favorite books) today to post to you. And I happen upon this blog that just posted this 2 days ago. 'good timing' if you believe in time;)no? an excerpt which also 'happens' to deal with distributed memory...ha.
I sincerely echo the intro/praise to the book here as well.thanks universe;)

The Power of Love & Trascendance - an excerpt from Csikszentmihalyi's Evolving Self
"One of the men who most influenced my perspective on the modern world is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I'm still amazed that Csikszentmihalyi's book The Evolving Self isn't continually cited. It gets my vote as the most overlooked and underappreciated books of our time.

Central to his thesis is the notion that a fully developed self comes from two often competing needs: the movements towards greater complexity and integration of that complexity into harmony, bringing those disparate elements into a whole self. Complexity results from pursuit of what makes us individuals, and he calls a person joyfully invested in complex goals a transcender. What follows is an excerpt of Evolving Self, using the Hungarian poet Gyorgy Faludy as an example.read the excerpt on R World blog

grandmothers perfume 11/26/2002
what is the scent of Nostalgia? Of memory tinged with longing and wonder?
these days I think it is my grandmother's perfume. A scent I can no longer imagine....though I can picture the bottle perfectly,(which I liked to hold as a child) can nearly feel the coolness of the glass, rub the facets of the shape. I can see the color of the perfume, feel the weight distribution change as the liquid sloshed back and forth in its container in my warm little girl hand. In my mind I can feel the slight resistance of the cap to turning, then its click of unsticking and agreeable undoing.In my mind I see the perfectly designed threaded unscrewing of metal and glass.. and then it is open, the scent particles floating out like unseen fairies to tickle my nose and beckon me closer...for one good real sniff.

But I cannot smell it. A few neurons in my brain whisper conspiratorally with eachother, offering the vaguest shadow memory teases of sweet and musk....but others boo them down from doubtful corners of my mind.."Nah, that's not IT, not it really..there's more to it."

And there I am lost in a daydream trying to smell my grandmother's perfume. Up on mental tiptoe, straining for that which is on the top, top shelf today...and coming up short.

Since I live in this strange age of the future I consult the internet, my own court wizard. Internet, I say, find me my grandmother's perfume. press search.

A stream of link-paths emerge and I browse their brief descriptions. I click and shoot down the rabbithole. Suddenly I am within some modern discount perfume shop staring at an item with the name of my grandmother's perfume. But it is a 'modernized' plastic topped spray cologne bottle so hideous to my eyes that I'm sure I would not be able to smell memory there. How could those mystical fairies live in such a bottle? I don't think so. I check a few more paths...and all lead to such 'updated' bottles.

Internet, I cry, this is not IT!!! Bring me my grandmother's perfume!

My wizard knows what to do. In silence he takes my hand and brings me to a room. The name on the door is one I am familiar with, a room I have avoided because it seemed such a time and energy drainer, preying on the consumerist addictions of the masses. I shudder. But I understand.

This is the Lost and Found. A very magical place. A very dangerous place. Enter at your own risk. Here you will find your grandmother's perfume.

I walk into ebay.

I type in my grandmother's perfume. press search.

In an instant I am staring at the exact bottle from my memory. It is a strange moment. A magical moment. A dangerous moment.

With this new power in my hands I browse my memory for other objects that have vaporized in time. And I search for them. And I find them. I want them back. I want it all back! I can recreate my grandmother's bathroom in its entirety! I can recreate my childhood bedroom! I can line my shelves with all my childhood toys! I can summon all objects lost back to me!! I can recreate the past, build tributes, altars, museum like buildings! I can touch and feel and smell what before I could only try to remember!! My grandmother's coin purse. The stuffed mechanical toy poodle in the photo my dad took so long ago!

And then I stop.

There is something not right about this. I feel suspended, hovering, weightless. The hands on all clocks have become cartoonlike. Clock? I want to see my grandmother's cuckoo clock, not the modern cheap plastic 'functional' one I picked up at Wal-Mart.

But wait. WAIT. there are whispers.

What is this longing? What is wrong? Why does this feel so WRONG?

I try to tune into the whispers like a radio.