Active Memory

I design cameras and make sculptures. Both practices begin with the meeting between a body and an object: how a hand grips a surface, where an eye is placed, and what happens when a button is pressed. I continue this work in parallel. The camera is a tool I help develop and a familiar structure through which I can ask different questions.

In industrial design, I have worked to make recording easier and more accessible. That work has also made me attentive to what happens around the finished image. A photograph can remain after a gesture, a conversation or a period of waiting has disappeared from view. My sculptures bring those actions forward. I use the forms, mechanisms and habits of photography to examine how we participate in an experience, as well as how we preserve its image.

In Reversal, a non-reversing mirror sits inside a camera-shaped sculpture. A person faces the object as though standing in front of a camera, but encounters a reflection whose orientation differs from an ordinary mirror. The work places the act of looking and the position of the subject in the same encounter. The familiar outline helps establish an expectation; the mirror unsettles it.

Eye to Eye changes a different part of that relationship. An opening passes through the body of a working camera, while a separate lens records the photograph. The photographer can remain visible to the person being photographed. This concern grew from my work on the screenless IVY REC. A viewing passage can frame the world, but it can also connect the people on opposite sides of a camera. The structure determines who can see whom.

Panorama uses the rotating mechanism of a panoramic film camera. The participant sets it, presses the release, waits through its spring-driven movement and rewinds it by hand. Rotation, sound and vibration become the event. I bring a mechanism normally understood through the photograph it produces into view as something with its own sequence and duration.

The interest is in what the mechanism asks of a person. A setting must be chosen; a release follows; the movement takes time. These concrete actions direct attention to the mechanism, including the pause before its movement ends. They offer a way to notice the relation between an operation and its result. The sculpture gives that relation a physical form, allowing the participant to approach it through a hand, an eye and an interval of attention.

I use Active Memory to name this inquiry into the actions surrounding a record: choosing, looking, waiting and returning. Keeping an image and remembering an experience are related, but they are not identical. I am interested in how devices organise our involvement in both.

Distance gives this question an optical form. When someone looks through it, the landscape appears farther away and blurred. I connect that receding view with the difficulty of reaching a past experience: something remains present, while its detail withdraws. I use this view as a visual analogy for remembering.

My continuing design work includes Saveclip, a lifelogging camera for which I designed the hardware and interface. Working with automatic recording belongs within the same inquiry. I want to consider which tasks a device can take on and which actions we want to keep choosing ourselves.

An optical effect can be understood quickly. I want the work to remain open after that first discovery. The objects are made to be encountered in an exhibition: someone approaches, looks, holds or operates them, and the relation between person and apparatus becomes visible. The photographs and recordings included here document those encounters through bodies, gestures and operating sequences.

I work with familiar forms because they carry habits into the gallery. A camera outline suggests a photograph; an eyepiece suggests a view. By changing what happens next, I can make those expectations available for reconsideration. The question running through the works is how we want to take part in the technologies through which we see, record and revisit our lives.