For my final I have selected Omer Fast - CNN Concatenated and Gary Hill – Incidence of Catastrophe from the videos screened in class this semester. The experience from watching both Fast & Hill video was very interesting in the way how memory was mediated. These two videos used personal, and recollection of memory, but both very far apart in how memory is conceived in their work. I will give my views on how each video artist applied their problem of memory in the following.
In CNN Concatenated, Fast creates a monologue into a collage of different news reporters used to narrate something they normally wouldn’t read off a teleprompter. The video is edited precisely by mixing each reporter word for word to deliver a message. A message
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I remember being in the ICU room on morphine to ease the intense pain not knowing that my life was hanging by a thread. They didn’t want to tell me, but it hit me after noticing that my family members where coming and going in pairs holding back tears. Thinking about that message, I was scared at that time but didn’t want my family to notice. It was hard for me to accept so I prayed and asked if it’s my time, take me, if not, heal me. So, yeah the message sort of hit home in that manner.
Hill’s Incidence of Catastrophe, was very different from what I experienced in Fast video. Hill made himself the protagonist from the novel Thomas The Obscure by Maurice Blanchot. Hill’s idea on this video derived from what he read and recreated the story himself based on personal memory. I felt the protagonist in the video was trapped in a bad dream and consumed by the words from the novel. There where scenes where he found himself running frantically through the woods giving me the impression he was trying to escape something or someone. He was attached to the novel so much that his presence at the dinner table felt unwelcomed that everybody stopped talking to each other. It was complicated understanding how everybody became insane near the end. The video ends with the protagonist laying down in the fetal position naked in his own excrement and mumbling unrecognized words.
Both videos where very different
Anyone reading Joshua Foer’s “The End of Remembering” can assume that he knows a lot about the brain and how it works. After all he graduated from Yale in 2004, and later went on to become the 2006 United States Memory Champion. With Foer’s interest in mental athletes he decided to do a journalism project to study them. This project would end up being the result of his book, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything from which “The End of Remembering” is one of the chapters. In this chapter Foer’s lays a solid foundation of the development of writing. He also includes historical views of remembering and how we learned in terms of our memory. Foer not only gives historical views but supports his claims with science
I fought the thoughts of not being able to breathe and allowing myself to have a panic attack. I have never been very religious, but it got to a point where counting didn’t help and the moment that destroyed my health replayed over and over. It was the few seconds prior to blacking out, to when I looked up at my rearview mirror and saw a truck coming right for me because he fell asleep. These thirty minutes of darkness symbolized the endless emotional and physical pain I had endured and my return to the darkness, which I cannot explain. So I prayed, hoping that even though I couldn’t remember all the verses, it would end the spinning and the torture. These moments of fear were more than claustrophobia; it was also a concoction of sadness. Sadness, that uncovered my weak and fragile human being self to the world because I had still not healed. As these thoughts deepened, the bed of the MRI machine began to move outward and I knew it was over. I hadn’t realized that my body was trembling until they took the thick white sheet off me. It revealed my shaking legs covered in Goosebumps and so, I pulled my fuzzy green socks up and with their help got off the bed. I wondered if that’s what it was like to live through a traumatic event or was it me being dramatic? Either way, I shut the door leaving the loud and terrible noises behind me. As I walked out, I could never see myself laying in that room again, unable to escape the endless
In Joshua Foer’s essay, “The End of Remembering” (found in Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, published 2011) he explores the history and current state of remembering and how technology affects it.
His choice to include researched historical information and not just that of his young memory, places the emotive journey of the film into a wider context or reality and detail. The way in which history informs memory within the film is essential in achieving a viewer’s deep and real understanding of the
2. Mastin, Luke. "The Human Memory - What It Is, How It Works and How It Can Go Wrong." The Human Memory - What It Is, How It Works and How It Can Go Wrong. The Human Memory.net, 2010. Web. 04 October 2015.
The past few days learning about memory basics and memory based on emotions has been very interesting. The memory basics was a bit of a review, as I remember learning about, encoding, consolidation and retrieval from my Principles of Psychology class. That being said, it is always good to refresh one’s memory on concepts previously discussed. The movie Inside Out displays the concept of memory very well and in a way that all ages can understand. The way that Inside Out depicted short term memory and long term memory seem to be somewhat accurate.
They (my family and doctors), for the first night, weren’t sure if I would make it or not. I was touch and go, because my oxygen level couldn’t be stabilized. I would be on oxygen and my level would be normal, but as soon as they took me off, my level would fall again. However, they had to stabilize me before they could do any kind of surgery. During this time, I think my dad as well as everyone involved got a taste of what it means that any moment, any day could be anyone’s final moment. My dad stayed every night with me. The first night, my heart quit beating twice. The first time, my dad said, “She’s a fighter, she can get through this.”. Then it happened again and my dad fell on his knees saying, “God, please don’t take her now!”. I ended up practically living in SICU for 3½ weeks, just trying to become stable enough, so I could make it somewhere else. Both my mom and dad had to become durable power of attorneys, so they could decide what my treatments would
Memory – what it is, how it works, and how it might be manipulated – has long been a subject of curious fascination. Remembering, the mind-boggling ability in which the human brain can conjure up very specific, very lucid, long-gone episodes from any given point on the timeline of our lives, is an astounding feat. Yet, along with our brain’s ability of remembrance comes also the concept of forgetting: interruptions of memory or “an inability of consciousness to make present to itself what it wants” (Honold, 1994, p. 2). There is a very close relationship between remembering and forgetting; in fact, the two come hand-in-hand. A close reading of Joshua Foer’s essay, “The End of Remembering”, and Susan Griffin’s piece, “Our Secret”, directs us
The experiment in which our Psychology 100 class participated was designed to illustrate the concept of memory, particularly at the point when a crime is committed. Split into two random groups, we all watched a video of a robbery with only one difference in each video-the weapon. Then, we were asked a series of questions about the video that we had to answer completely by memory. During this experiment, the memories we formed were created mostly with sensory memory, resulting more specifically in an iconic store, meaning the information we received was almost entirely visual. Because the video could only be viewed once and because information retained in the short-term memory remains for less than twenty seconds,
Something shifted in me listening to the stories of pain of two very formative people in my life. Something inside of me recognized the sacredness of this conversation. Once I heard
This paper will take a look at Salvador Dali’s painting, The Persistence of Memory, painted in 1931. As the viewer can tell, this is a story of time and life. The memories start in the background where all is well and things are straight and calm. Moving on to the cliff, the observer possibly sees a well-behaved teenager. There is nothing horrible here that leads the spectator to gasp, and the viewer knows this person made it through that time in their life. Then the picture moves on to the age of about twenty, the memories are fond but in the distant past. The memories are protected by a white blanket so that they do not just fall into the background. Then something happened where the person had some
An ambulance came and carried out my mom. I didn’t know what was going on, so many questions running through my mind, what was wrong with her, was she going to be ok. I was scared, more scared then I had ever been. My sister Sheridan who was 8 asked me “what’s happening?” through tears. On that day a little piece of me began to change because if I let her see my fear that would not help anyone, and so even though I didn’t know what was happening I responded “everything is going to be ok” even though I did not trust my own words.
The Persistence of Memory is an incredibly iconic piece of art. I, as well as many others, have seen it many times, yet never really took the time to actually look at it and try to understand what Dalí was trying to convey within this painting. That’s why I decided to choose this painting to analyze. Dalí’s realistic, yet dreamlike painting, shows something as simple as time, and portrays it in ways that one would never really think
Central idea: Memory is a process of the brain which is prone to certain failures, although specific steps can be taken to guard against these failures.
I remember the exact feeling that came over me when I first heard very clearly. My mom then came in from another room and was extremely pale. Her eyes were as watery as a flooded river during a storm. I saw her, and she saw me. We both, crying like babies, had a long and love-filled embrace in the middle of my house. I am not going to go into detail about everything else that happened, but no more than two hours after that moment my mom and I were in a car on the way to the airport to fly to England. This was one of the hardest plane rides I have ever had to experience. When we arrived to my mom's hometown, Liverpool, an array of sorrow and sadness filled the air. On the other hand, there was also a huge feeling of love. I felt a deep connection with every one of my family members. We were all together, and nowhere else would we rather have been at that time. We went on to grow so much closer as a family.