Presence of Our Past

We live in a time of constant digital documentation and accumulation. Camera-embedded mobile devices paired with virtually limitless digital storage has fostered a climate of relentless image capturing. We capture experiences we want to remember, but we also capture images as a form of communication, socialization, self-expression, and documentation. In the past we were able to better curate our image collections due to their scale and form. However, today these exist intangibly, captured and largely forgotten on hard drives and servers. These ever-growing collections of digital images represent a rich, varied, personalized visual narration of our lives. While we are not willing to delete them we also have no real means of meaningfully consuming them at that scale. Through my research I developed a device for displaying our growing collections in our homes. By condensing our mass of photos horizontally, we can each begin to create an individual image of our pasts, with each color representing a compressed memory. We can also zoom into this collection to individually explore our images or alter the assortment on the screen, creating different visual narratives to be displayed within our homes. The attached image shows over 1,800 photos (every photo taken during graduate school) that then acts as a visual representation of my experiences during that time.