Tails of memory

Students:   Liakati Christina, Nechalioti Anastasia, Piniara Ioanna
Supervisors: Vergopoulos Stauros, Paka Alkmini
Institution: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Faculty of Architecture
Presentation date: 28/09/2012

In this diploma thesis, a narrative is employed as a process which negotiates with impressions and perceptions and attempts to unravel their web of interactions.

 

 

In this way, it intends to envision architecture as a field, an object and an atmosphere through scenario events that can be experienced either spaced apart or overlapped.

The main characters in this narrative crave to enter such a different reality, which is not visible to them, yet lies inside their eyes, buried and repressed. The image of their desired place epitomizes the paradox of their architectural experiences on earth, ranging from materiality to microstructure. It is about a transitional territory between the land and the landscape, between an object and its depiction that generate a parallel drawing of the landscape.

 

 

The new field is stabilized over an installation, whose surface wraps up the earth as a second skin, continuous and isotropic, integrating all the dimensions and the surroundings. The outcome is a complex, multidimensional setting, a hybrid between a landscape and a diagram, a chronographic model that combines surface and relief. It is about a territory of flux that encloses everything; it is the body, the landscape, the backgrounds and the objects.

 

 

Within this framework, a transition to such a chronographic model is attempted, through the establishment and analysis of the stages of intermediation that are acknowledged. At every stage the impact of memory, light and space-time are examined in a perceptual procedure, through which the world reveals itself.

The chronographic analysis of a mapped light path, which is applied upon various surfaces and materials  during modelization , splits the current time to snapshots. In each snapshot, which is considered as a time fraction able to carry memory, is examined the delicate balance of the components that constitute the information and the proportion in which they form it. Thus, the new field gets the opportunity to negotiate with the "aspect of the moment", to amplify it through the dimensions of space and incidents. That means to provide a spatial and temporal condition capable of accommodating a new recollection.

 

 

The light imprint of every image is codified and inserted into an algorithmic process, which simulates and reproduces concurrently multiple images of remembrance. The main purpose is, after a process of decoding, the emergence of an augmented territory that oscillates between the starting point of the users' desires and the intimate space of their memories. All the memories, as light imprints upon reliefs, surfaces and materials, assemble in "a continual memorial".

 

 

The algorithmic setting is abstract and gets disclosed to the user through a feedback mechanism. At every stage, is followed a process of information decoding - in a form the user is able to affiliate to- , new information codification - as a result from user's recollected memory images- and latter's reintegration to the process. In this repetitive loop, simultaneously take place as many incidents,  as the users' memories are.

 

At every aspect of the moment, these incidents are revealed fragmentarily; in terms of  the stages of intermediation that they have gone through and their  interaction with other ongoing incidents.

 

 

Thereafter, the scenario rather comes to "an ever-changing sequence of probabilities". Within this continuous feedback loop, where users, processes and parallel realities are involved, it is no longer clear whether the environment is producing an image of the memory or the memory is producing an image of the environment.