One Year Life Strata

2017. 3 channel interactive video installation (online platform + 3d printed sculpture)

Throughout the entire year 2015, shaped by her father’s experience of frontotemporal dementia and as part of a broader investigation into the fear of forgetting in the digital age, Molina Peiró carried a wearable camera that automatically took a photograph every 30 seconds. The vast image archive that emerged was transformed into an interactive work that, rather than “remembering,” generates a form of creative amnesia.

One Year Life Strata proposes a visual metaphor for forgetting by transforming this archive into what may ultimately become the last memory left of us: the geological record. Through a form of digital geology, the images are gradually buried and made invisible. Yet the archive can still be explored through an artificial intelligence system—one that is indifferent to the memories contained in the images and interested instead in the data and patterns it can extract from them. María’s personal archive thus becomes a territory of extraction, mirroring the automated processes operating across the internet.

We have never had so many tools for remembering and, paradoxically, those same tools feed our fear of forgetting. This fear sustains a vast machinery of extraction serving commercial interests, surveillance systems and new forms of control. One Year Life Strata proposes embracing forgetting as an act of resistance, burying the memories of one year of María’s life within a temporality that exceeds the human scale: the slow, deep time of geology.

Tags: Future Fossils, Digital Forgetting, Data Mining, Obsolescence, Mortality, Deep Time, Anthropocene, technofossil, AI, Fear of forgetting, Total Recall, Surveillance,  Digital Memory.