Grandmother/Heirloom, 2015

Single-channel video 00:06:39, 3D-printed porcelain, and digital prints on wallpaper

Our memories are anything but reliable. According to Prof. Aleida Assman, “memories are not an exact reflection of past events, but are always distorted by the limitation of our perspective, our perceptions, our needs and our emotions”. This project is about my grandmother, an attempt to store her memory and create an heirloom. Using a portable 8-channel EEG-reader, I captured different aspects of her brain activity. I then 3D modelled the recorded EEG-data into a cylindrical object and printed it in 3D with porcelain. The beginning of the recording starts at the base of the porcelain, moving upwards twenty-five centimetes to cover a period of one minute.

As memories resemble artifacts of the past, I want to create porcelains that physically embody one’s memories by reconstructing pre-recorded brain EEG-data. This not only ascribes a physicality to memories, but also allows to create an archive of the past for the future. The reconstruction of visual experiences from brain activity has already been done. In 2011’s study conducted by Shinji Nishimoto shows that results from the visual translation of brain activation recordings during the demonstration of images are quite close to the original.

Video
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