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Univ.-Prof. Dr. Aglaja Przyborski
| Titel | The Memory Model Project |
| Typ | FWF PEEK Projekt |
| Texte | Models are useful tools in architecture, science, and education: They help solve design issues, make complex structures more comprehensive, and – by their aesthetic appeal – captivate audiences’ attention. Such models cherish coherence and objectivity; the model claims, as Max Black argues: “This is how the original is”1. In contemporary art, by contrast, “models-as-art”2 reify subjective, ambiguous, and experimental realities. A typical example of such a reality is our memory. Memories are full of gaps and distortions. In some areas it is crucial to minimise them (e.g., when witness testimony is used to disclose forensic or historical facts) but in others they are embraced. Not only in art, but also in therapeutic, and sociological contexts it is often most pertinent to observe how the past is experienced and becomes meaningful for a person or social group from the vantage point of the present.
These observations gave rise to the idea of exploring whether/how artistic approaches to modelling can be developed to elicit and communicate idiosyncratic memories. This interest was further fuelled by another fact: The predominant medium to access and communicate memories is the verbal narrative. Some memories are distinctly visual and spatial, however, and it stands to reason that these may perhaps be expressed more germanely in a visual and spatial medium. The Memory Model Project will thus investigate differences between models and verbal language in endeavours to express subjective experiences. It bases on the hypothesis that models can materialise the retrospective experience of places by giving them a visual vocabulary. Not only will they manifest latent and personal versions of reality for the private benefit of their maker, they also make them tangible as works of art and analytically accessible in a new medium.
Examples from contemporary art encourage this endeavour. Mike Kelley’s assembly of models of all the schools he attended (Educational Complex, 1995) is one. A remarkable feature is that Kelley includes errors in memory by leaving blank areas where he was unable to remember any details. Roger Welch also embraced distortions of memory when he asked old people to describe their childhood neighbourhoods while reconstructing them with little wood blocks (Memory Maps, 1973). Michael Grothusen’s Scale Model, From Memory (2008) is another example. Rebuilding the wood frame construction of a house he lived in some decades ago, the artist undertakes “an attempt to reconcile early spatial memories with a structure that conforms to architectural logic”3. Other examples come from hobby modellers. London resident Roma Hopkinson recreated the house she lived in during World War II and Malayan pensioner Wan Morshidi rebuilt an entire village from memory that was overrun by an expanding city in the 1970s. Such instances suggest that more than just reified memoirs are at stake when memory models are made. They are (still rare) artistic experiments with remembering itself; a way of remembering through physical material and creative action.
It is known from people responding to narrative interviews or writing their memoirs that intensely engaging with the past clarifies (and triggers ever more) memories, which are consequently woven into meaningful stories.4 It is also known that the experience of telling one’s story supports the self-perceived impression ofcontinuity and meaning in one’s life and thus helps to shape one’s sense of self.5 Similar or even stronger effects are expected when memories are cast in models because model making supplements the experience with visual and haptic feedback. 6 Conversations with model makers indicate such an effect.7 In this vein, the Memory Model Project will be an investigation of modelling as an activity of triggering and documenting memories.
The shared thematic framework of our approach will be personal memories of home interiors. Everyone remembers some former home and buildings are perennial objects of modelling in art and design (see below). We expect that personal, home-related memories will become tangible in a new format as a selective, constructive, and narrative process. We also expect that incomplete, fleeting, and shadowy recollections can be given a new – visual – language. Eingereicht: 01/2020 Laufzeit 2 Jahre Status: abgelehnt Kooperation DE (Ottersberg) |
| Projektleitung | Jozwiak, Jörg |
| Projektpartner*innen | Przyborski Aglaja Marent, Johannes Menegon, Martina Reichle, Ingeborg Schulze, Contanze Schubert, Franz |
| Förderung | FWF, Der Wissenschaftsfonds |
| Förderkategorie | FWF PEEK |
| Beteiligung | Bertha von Suttner Privatuniversität St. Pölten: Kooperation Hochschule für Künste im Sozialen, Ottersberg GmbH: Kooperation Universität für Angewandte Kunst Wien: Kooperation |
| Datum | Datum: 2020-01-31 - |
| Status | abgelehnt |
