BINTARO DESIGN DISTRICT2024

Memories aren’t tangible, yet they are one of the things that we lose the most of. The appeal of an accurate representation of a moment, a memory, is only fully realized after the first photograph in human history, through an analog medium. When that is superseded through digital mediums, by performance and longevity, does that determine analog mediums to be obsolete?

An exploration of neurological, analog, and digital mediums are needed to understand the role of memories.

The true function of memories for us as humans, to better understand the principles, and how memories should be kept and presented.

The “goldfish” Is a tool to explore the principalities of memory, while it is a tangible physical object, it enables the user to explore latent spaces between analog, digital and neurogical. It serves as the twilight zone, a gray area between mediums.

The “goldfish” serves as a tangible expression of what a memory represents, capturing space and time in a way that is easily processed and recalled (an image). Although digital mediums are inherently more permanent, memory stored in this device degrades over the course of hours, leaving the user the option of replacing it with a new memory immediately or allowing it to slowly fade overtime. A tangible expression of memory is also produced in the form of transfer paper, a print that has a relatively short lifespan.

The device hopes to mimic the process of how a memory is captured in the human mind, this means taking into account the limitations of cognitive memory, such as how we forget (temporal decay), interference with other memories (retroactive and proactive) and encoding errors (distortion).

The “goldfish” captures “memory” through a camera, then displays it via an E-ink monitor, the only way the device can do so, is if the user initiates a memory capture done through a button. Once initiated, the image is replaced by the most recent capture and the previous image is erased permanently.