Interactive Animation. 1280 x 720 px. 2006-07
Distant Air is an interactive timeline that charts 5 vivid memories of birds ranging from when I was a child. This project uses a combination of truth and exaggeration, based on dreams and memories, to demonstrate how a massaged fiction can be in some way as important, or more-so, than a mere description is.
Memory
When retelling a memory, the event must be conjured, traced, and summarized into a story. This recollection is never told exactly as it happened, because it is filtered through the experiences of the person telling it – that person’s memory. Because of this, memory is essentially a composed fiction based on fact. Although accuracy may suffer, the recollection can become deeper, richer, and more enhanced with each telling, as the teller adds his or her own impressions and ideas to the recollection. Each of these recollections, or ‘stories’ have been embellished beyond fact, because recalling fact is impossible. Therefore, all that is left is decorative language and fiction which can be more provocative and impressionable than hazy truth.
Recalling a remembered event instantly creates a storyteller. The story, like memory itself, is both lucid and plastic, evocative and changing. Events become skewed or exaggerated, or omitted altogether. This can happen in order to make the story more engaging, or through a failure of memory – something forgotten. Often it is the resonance of an event, the affect of that moment in time, that stirs a memory. What is important is not the precise accuracy of the facts, but that this essence is revealed and passed on. It’s the way the story is told that is remembered.
