MEMORY CLOUD (2018) is a video projection showing a movement of merging abstract colours, supported with snippets of sounds from film, television and radio featuring dialogue about remembrance.

The video contains 100 randomly selected images from my personal digital archive, each one deconstructed to remove the specificity of its content and leave only traces of the essential colours within the picture. The interest in this particular style was inspired by the abstract paintings of Mark Rothko, particularly where the lines between the colours are blurred in a way that suggest optical movement as if merging into each other like a portal to another world.

Inspired by works of artists like Pipilotti Rist and Joan Jonas, whose video installations often engulf spaces, this work similarly aims to create an immersive environment where viewers can be enveloped within a digital memory cloud that may encourage them to recall their own thoughts, emotions or histories.

The colours and soundbites are designed to trigger memory should any viewers have connections to them in any way, shape or form. The colour patterns are mostly basic and can be associated with a number of things, while the films include widely recognisable titles that many people would have encountered naturally, most of them from within the last 20 years.

Researchers have long studied the relationship between memory, sight and sound, such as the 2002 study of American Psychological Association on “The Contributions of Colour to Recognition Memory for Natural Scenes”, considering colour as a trigger for certain images archived in the brain. It would be a useful area to explore further moving forward.

​The audio track is primarily made up of lines from more than 65 popular films, gathering fragments of dialogue relating to memory from a wide range of scenarios, each one selected to support the aims of the colour visuals. It is punctuated and distorted by a mash up of familiar sounds including clocks, radio and television.