Medeology Collective
'Frameworks of Memory'
10/20 'Frameworks of Memory', Live Media Performance and Installation at Inlight, Virginia, USA
Medeology Collective
" Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost."
Gaston Bachelard, ‘The Poetics of Space’ (1958)
For 'Frameworks of Memory' we used a pre-existing house structure at the backfield of the historical Tredegar museum grounds. To do this we covered most of the structure with white fabric. We projected onto this so that the artwork was a 3D sculptural environment. The content, ‘house’ and ‘home’ have many connotations which we explored both in structured and improvisational forms. The environments created in and on the structure took the form of a burning house, as well as panoramas of dreams and mindscapes creating a 'virtual psycho-reality'. Using fire to conjure imagery, the ‘fire-light’ as a way to illuminate memories and the past through the live and transitory medium of digital video. This referenced connotations of the burning of Richmond, and the survival of Tredegar from destruction during the evacuation by Confederates during the Civil War. The audience was able to enter and explore the house and its imagery. It also involved interactivity through the use of cameras to live feed those who entered. The work also included issues and themes such as sanctuary, fortress, love, prison and family, as well as social issues of the housing crisis and social decay. We even managed to include projection mapping of collapse and deconstructed frames. This inter-weaving created a live monument to an architecture of memory.
Pre-visualization pics of the work - almost identical to the final execution.