Display The Memory In Image

For my Research in Practice course my project topic is the memory in image. I will show the different kind of artists and philosophers how to use their art works and personal theory to explain the memory in image. 

The reason for I choose this topic -- The Memory In Image is because I am a art and design course student.  I enjoy experimenting with light, colour, subject & mediums; mixing & matching the different aspects for individual results. A lot of my interest in art and design also lies in other's interpretation of it. 

I have a keen interest in photography, I really enjoy the process of creating photos especially when the freeze frame of a moment can be transformed into a single beautiful image. I have previously tried to combine photography and video to create work. I think that it is interesting to combine these two techniques.

And also I am a person who likes to stay in the memory. Some memory's images are very special and very precious, many times I would imagine myself can be back to the memories of the tie. However in fact that the memory image is always cannot be copied, but we can use the photography or video / film way to recording the past and let the images which is in memory can reproduce again.

I am a art and design student,so when I plan to do the theme for this, I always thinking how to display/explain my own memory to the audiences. In my opinion, memory is a very personal existence.I need put it out of my mind, and then to let it become a figurative readable exist. Since the ancient times to nowadays, a lot of people behave the memory for many different kind of ways. Except the type of oral way, their also use the way for music, painting, photography, film, installation art, and so on to express the memory. 

However I always focus on the visual things. I think the visual effect of passing out is straightforward. Most of memory are composed of different images (remove the sound aspect). The images consists of the difference between static and dynamic, the first thought in the form of photography is the static showing on the screen memories. The dynamic is the video / movie recording and creation. 

In this blog, I will focus on using photography and video these two ways to interpret and display the memory in image. Also, I will combine the art works / theory from a number of artists, philosophers and my personal opinions / art works together.

Roland Barthes -- Camera Lucida

I'd like to use photography to record memories. Photography can help me to put memorable moments pause, and permanent preservation. I use photography to make art works, the image of those outputs are very honest expression and record my thoughts, my life narrative. I think photography is not just a technology, it is evidence that people existed and portrayal. The first person who gave me the most important theoretical basis is derived from Roland Gérard Bathes.

Roland Gérard Barthes (12 November 1915–26 March1980). He was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism,semiotics, social theory, anthropology and post-structuralism.

Roland Barthes was born on 12 November 1915 in the town of Cherbourg in Normandy. He was the son of naval officer Louis Barthes, who was killed in a battle in the North Sea before his son was one year old. His mother, Henriette Barthes, and his aunt and grandmother raised him in the village of Urt and the city of Bayonne. When Barthes was eleven, his family moved to Paris, though his attachment to his provincial roots would remain strong throughout his life.

My research from him is his book -- Camera Lucida. Camera Luida is a short book published in 1980 by the French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes. It is simultaneously an inquiry into the nature and essence of photography and a eulogy to Barthes' late mother. The book investigates the effects of photography on the spectator (as distinct from the photographer, and also from the object photographed, which Barthes calls the "spectrum").

In a deeply personal discussion of the lasting emotional effect of certain photographs, Barthes considers photography as asymbolic, irreducible to the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind. The book develops the twin concepts of studium and punctum:studium denoting the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph, punctum denoting the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it.

For Barthes, every photograph, rather than being a representation, is an expression of loss. The photograph, like all art which precedes it, attempts to eternalize its subject, to imbue it with life-forever, to blend the beautiful with the infinite; but it fails, it reminds us only of mortality (death is the mother of beauty). Try though it may, and despite its resemblance to life, the photo can never extend a life which is lost, or a life which is passing.

Here was an opportunity to think for a moment about Barthes’ book anew (a book which has always perplexed me for its narrow reading of photography). Halfway through Camera Lucida, Barthes shifts his discussion from public photographs (journalism, advertisements and the like) to private photographs:

Now, one November evening shortly after my mother’s death, I was going through some photographs. I had no hope of “finding” her, I expected nothing from these “photographs of a being thinking of him or her” (Proust). I had acknowledged that fatality, one of the most agonizing features of mourning, which decreed that however often I might consult such images, I could never recall her features (summon them up as a totality)….I could not even say that I loved [these photographs]: I was not sitting down to contemplate them, I was not engulfing myself in them. I was sorting them, but none seemed to me really “right”: neither as a photographic performance nor as a living resurrection of the beloved face. If I were ever to show them to friends I could doubt that these photographs would speak.

It has always seemed to me that Barthes expected too much from these photographs of his mother. Barthes, who takes an absolutist position here, decides that photography is inadequate to the task of resurrecting his mother’s “being.” Nevertheless, as he looks at photograph after photograph he does admit to “gradually moving back in time with her”: he hears again the sound of the lid of an ivory powder box and he can recall “the rumpled softness of her crêpe de Chine and the perfume of her rice powder.”But then, suddenly, he turns up a photograph that provides “the truth of the face I had loved,” thus redeeming the promise of photography.

So I think the photos to its subjects with confirmed resistance . Like my personal work , the memories of a particular swing shot into the video to record it had meaning for me and after contact with it . A person or an article is taken down, it proved it once existed in this world . In many cases, photographs are used as evidence of the real world exists , it shows the people and things definitely existed.

But I think the photos of the energy is used to demonstrate not only the memories are so thin and simple. They show someone or something in a moment of history ever existed , is exactly this moment must inevitably disappear. The existence of photo and video viewing images can prompt people had noticed the characteristics of the time will not repeat , someone or something to remind people in the state can no longer have a specific time and space , or someone / thing will never again re- now , as they have in the past or disappeared, they have become only the image remains in this world evidence. Also became the basis for our memories.

When we watch a photographic works when it is natural to think about the fate of images and stories of the characters or in kind , to imagine the state when filming . Roland Barthes saw his mother at age 5 and older brother of a photo, can not help but imagine the photographer at that time she said , " a little before the station , looking to get you ."

Photos recording originally existed to prove someone or something , but the result has led to viewing images of these people and things that people have not consciousness. I can think of a typical example of this is the time when the old man look younger photos, will not repeat youthful memories ever . Therefore, these become our figurative, can touch memories through photographs or video output image.

Take a picture or record a video at the same time has also created a new world and time and space . Appearing in the image in the world exists in another time and space, its eternal rest forever exist only in areas where memories . However photographic artistry on the performance here , I think it is always good photography can pull us out of the real life photography on display temporarily enter another world.

　　 

Siegfried Kracauer

However, in the other hand, another person has a certain extent negates photographic record memories. The premise is that he took the photography and the memories of itself to do a comparison.

Siegfried Kracauer was a German writer, journalist, sociologist, cultural critic, and film theorist. He has sometimes been associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.

Siegfried Kracauer's theories on memory revolved around the idea that memory was under threat and was being challenged by modern forms of technology. His most often cited example was the comparison of memory to photography. The reason for this comparison was that photography, in theory, replicates some of the tasks currently done by memory.


The differences in the functions of memory and the functions of photography, according to Kracauer, is that photography creates one fixed moment in time whereas memory itself is not beholden to a singular instance. Photography is capable of capturing the physicality of a particular moment, but it removes any depth or emotion that might otherwise be associated with the memory. In essence, photography cannot create a memory, but rather, it can create an artifact. 


He think memory on the other hand, is not beholden to one particular moment of time, nor is it purposefully created. Memories are impressions upon a person that they can recall due to the significance of the event or moment.

Photography can also work to record time in a linear way, and Kracauer even hints that floods of photographs ward off death by creating a sort of permanence. However, photography also excludes the essence of a person, and overtime, photographs lose meaning and become a “heap of details.” This isn't to say that Kracauer felt that photography has no use for memory, it is simply that he felt that photography held more potential for historical memory than for personal memory. Photography allows for a depth of detail that can be to the advantage of a collective memory, such as how a city or town once appeared because those aspects can be forgotten, or overridden throughout time as the physical landscape of the area changes.

I saw the research form Kracauer  is in the book Memory / edited by Ian Farr. There are have two articles from him -- Memory Images and Photography Translated by Thomas Y. Levin 

In the article Kracauer said: memory encompasses neither the entire spatial appearance nor the entire temporal course of an event. Compared to photography memory's records are full of gaps. The fact that the grandmother was at one time involved in a nasty story that is being recounted time and again because one really doesn't like to talk about it-this doesn't mean much from the photographer's perspective. He knows the first little wrinkles on her face and has noted every date. Memory does not pay much attention to dates; it skips years or stretches temporal distance. The selection of traits that it assembles must strike the photographer as arbitrary. The selection may have been made this way rather than another because disposition and purposes required the repression, falsification, and emphasis of certain parts of the object; a virtually endless number of reasons determines the remains to be filtered. No matter which scenes a person remembers, they all mean something that is relevant to him or her without his or her necessarily knowing what they mean. Memories are retained because of their significance for that person. Thus they are organized according to a principle that is essentially different from the organizing principle of photography. Photography grasps what is given as a spatial (or temporal) continuum; memory-images retain what is given only insofar as it has significance. Since what is significant is not reducible to either merely spatial or merely temporal terms, memory-images are at odds with photographic representation. From the latter's perspective, memory-images appear to be fragments but only because photography does not encompass the meaning to which they refer and in relation to which they cease to be fragments. Similarly, from the perspective of memory, photography appears as a jumble that consists partly of garbage.The meaning of memory-images is linked to their truth content. As

long as they are embedded in the uncontrolled life of the drives they are inhabited by a demonic ambiguity; they are opaque like frosted glass that hardly a ray of light can penetrate. Their transparency increases to the extent that insights thin out the vegetation of the soul and limit the compulsion of nature. Truth can only be found by a liberated consciousness that assesses the demonic nature of the drives. The traits that consciousness recollects stand in a relationship to what has been perceived as true, the latter being either manifest in these traits or shut out by them. The

 image in which these traits are to be found is distinguished from all other memory-images, for unlike the latter it preserves not a multitude of opaque recollections but instead elements that touch upon what has been recognized as true. All memory-images are bound to be reduced to this type of image, which may rightly be called the last image, since in it alone does the unforgettable persevere. The last image of a person is that person's actual "history." In this history, all characteristics and determinations that do not relate in a significant sense to the truth intended by a liberated consciousness drop out. How a person represents this history does not depend purely on his or her natural constitution nor on the pseudo coherence of his or her individuality; thus only fragments of these assets are included in his or her history. This history is like a monogram that condenses the name into a single graphic figure that is meaningful as an ornament. Eckart's monogram is fidelity. Great historical figures survive in legends that, however naive they may be, strive to preserve their actual history. In authentic fairy tales, the imagination has intuitively deposited

typical monograms. In a photograph a person's history is buried as if under a layer of snow.

After I read the theory form Siegfried Kracauer, I still better like to agree with the photography's theory form Roland Gérard Barthes. Because in my opinion,  I think the photography is not just a skills to recording the memory, actually I feel it is a sensual artistic behavior.  I also feel Kracauer's theory for photography is more rationalistic.  I think the photograph does not preserve the transparent aspects of an object but instead captures it as a spatial continuum from any one of a number of positions. The last memory in image outlasts time because it is unforgettable; the photograph, which neither refers to nor encompasses such a memory image, must be essentially associated with the moment in time at which it came into existence.

Gaston Bachelard

If we look at it from another point of view, photography is actually very suitable existence. it does not need such a scientific measurement of the difference between itself and the memory to some extent. Photography has its unique effect, it can be connected to the memories and art. It records and create a fixed time and space, but it is showing works across time and space. Only this point, let the technology is full of mystery. Photographic output screen allows us to have a lot of associations, which can be filled with beauty, poetic. In fact, the memory is can be a poetic thing.

I search a French philosopher -- Gaston Bachelard. He was a philosopher of science and literary critic. He made contributions in the fields of poetics and the philosophy of science. To the latter he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break(obstacle épistémologique et rupture épistémologique). He rose to some of the most prestigious positions in the Académie française and influenced many subsequent French philosophers, among them Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dominique Lecourt and Jacques Derrida.

Bachelard was a postmaster in Bar-sur-Aube, and then studied physics before finally becoming interested in philosophy. He was a professor at Dijon from 1930 to 1940 and then became the inaugural chair in history and philosophy of the sciences at the Sorbonne.

I research the book for "The Poetics of Space " ( La Poétique de l'Espace, 1958) . In this book, Bachelard think the house is the quintessential phenomenological object, meaning that this is the place in which the personal experience reaches its epitome. Bachelrad sees the house as a sort of initial universe, asserting that "all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home" (The Poetics of Space, p.5). Bachelard proceeds to examine the home as the manifestation of the soul through the poetic image and literary images which are found in poetry. He examines locations in the house as places of intimacy and memory which are manifested in poetry.

Bachelard thinks, we are comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. 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.

I choose Bacheard's memory theory is because, I have some works for the memory project was set up in a dark intimate space. This kind of set up is from my opinion of the space and memories. I think the space is having a sense of security, stability, intimate that for carry memories has a very important influence. I showed the memory images are all present the simple black and white colors, this tone corresponds to a set up of memory space environment. 

Therefore, I research Gaston Bachelard’s theory. Also it is in "The Poetics of Space" ( La Poétique de l'Espace, 1958) shows a phenomenological interrogation into the meaning of spaces which preoccupy poetry, intimate spaces such as a house, a drawer, a night dresser and spaces of wide expansion such as vistas and woods. 

                                         From my work which is in a dark intimate space

For Bachelard's theory, my opinion is memories are subjective. We are very difficult to achieve the same objective as the historical record of comments in the past. Memories are very poetic, I think that carried memories of the occasion (space) is very important. Their presence is sometimes determines the content and direction of memories.

Joanne Lyons's memory art work

For the video part, I was found the research form Joanne Lyons. Joanne Lyons is an artist to do the video and installation. Her childhood memory always inform Lyons’ art works. She made the art work 'lightness' .That video is recoding when she was five year old, she play and chasing a butterfly. Joanne Lyons had watched the video with her family for many times. She said ,'It came to me one day that it would be a good way to symbolize that feeling. When I was copying the film to video and it started degenerating — that breaking apart…with spaces between everything…created an openness and airiness.'

She also got other video works is about memory, which is two red balls knock rhythmically and randomly against each other. 

The Kaleidoscope project uses video projections of crocheted doilies Joanne Lyons collected in thrift stores and garage sales to make shifting patterns on a child’s toy. The same crocheted collection inspired At the Bottom of Memory, a diorama of mysterious cutout creatures that evolved from graphite rubbings of the doilies.

Joanne Lyons said, 'I love the kinds of things that you can do with technology, especially the video projection, but sometimes I have to spend a lot of time learning how to do something in order to get what I want. I like figuring things out and…will spend inordinate amounts of time…some difficult technical problem and then I think, this is kind of silly, I should be making art not figuring out these little problems, but I can’t get away from it because it’s part of what I do.'

'In a piece like the Corridor installation for instance, there was quite a bit to figure out, even little things like the exact distance the projector had to be from the screen and how…to do the masking. With installation art, there’s more problem-solving than in any other medium….You learn how to think on your feet because you have to come up with a solution. Artists are very good at that, and at doing it economically. You start haunting the hardware stores, looking for all kinds of materials that are really not art materials at all, and then talking to people, getting advice.'

Like Lyons said, ' some difficult technical problem and then I think, this is kind of silly, I should be making art not figuring out these little problems, but I can’t get away from it because it’s part of what I do.' For my art project, in the beginning, I took the video for a swing in the outside public space. How after that I just feel the outside space have too many information around the swing. For example the trees and buildings. If I plan to take the video for clearly and simple swing, the best thing is make a real swing in the inside art space. And than I can use the professional digital dark room to take the video. I feel that will good got my project. So I begin to make a swing in school space. Then I finished a wood swing in school wood workshop. And also, I still was thinking how to set up the vidicon on the swing sit and go through the lens to let the people feel it's looks like the view from a person who set on the swing to saw.

The work for my indoor swing set up video

Lyons began as a painter but says, 'It was a real inspiration to me the first time I saw mixed media work. I hadn’t really been exposed to it that much so when I saw that people could use items of clothing, for instance, as art, and the way that images could be caught up and put together again and collaged…was influential and exciting.'

The concept of beauty, Lyons says,  is 'essential to my art practice and to my life…Every project that I’ve done has some sense of that…the work gets more and more that way. If things aren’t going well for me, I have to search out…I get desperate to see something beautiful. To not use beauty in your work when it’s absolutely essential in your life would be crazy.'

I think as an artist, you should be able to have one pair of eyes find beautiful things. I have the same idea as lyons said. One of my video work in this term is trying to record the video special images in my memory, and made them ​​into the images of connectivity. All the landscape in the video are in edgbaston area and the river place which is close to brindley place in Birmingham. There are the places I used to visit and live. I compared four different scenes. Generated by comparing them to describe the gap between different memories and reality. 

                                 The Memory In Landscape