Audio Visual — Script
Last semester, my final statement was “Digital archiving is the more sustainable way to keep sentimental items”. To recap, I am interested in preserving the sentimental items without encumbering. So digital archive has the benefit in this way and it is interesting to explore how it could be developed.
I continued to explore the relationship between human and objects. In a book named Evocative Objects: Things We think With by Sherry Turkle. She categorised the universal power of evocation into 6 categories : 1: Objects of Design and Play, 2: Objects of Discipline and Desire, 3: Objects of History and Exchange, 4 : Objects of Transition and Passage, 5: Objects of Mourning and Memory, and 6: Objects of Meditation and New Vision
She also tells about how she uses the concept of bricolage to look for a trace of her lost father through objects in her apartment. From two topic I got from this book I see how objects connect to be as a whole story and understand more of how objects could provoke thought. I started by list out my stuff by the category that I mentioned.
As I read many articles related to stuff parents left for their children, I am interested in preserving identity after death. I researched about the grave, shrine, online memorial and digital inheritance. So I experimented on making a collage of the stuff that I listed out into the different way of symbolic of respect and memorial.
An article I read is about a secret room of a father where it feels like the time was froze. He kept the old furniture from their first house, and the other stuff of his sons. In the book Comfort of Things by Daniel Miller, he talks about how objects in a room could express identities and how the room had been organised could too. So it inspired me to experiment is with the 3D room. One of the limitation of digital files is it loses the sense of real scale between the real space so I thought this way may reduce the lost sense.
Then I want to refine my concept. I summarised my intention into two points. The first is to preserve the sentimental items and bring them to the future through digital archive as the main point. The second is to emphasise what is important to each person. From these two points, I would like to communicate it through a platform design.
My expectation is a platform that user can archive their stuff in their virtual room. But each item will be screen by answering questions from the 6 categories that I mentioned before to make sure that the item is really important for them. I also want to include the legacy feature to forward the storage space to their family or anyone they want.
