The Persistence of Memory

The mind is a curious thing. In going through an old proposal for my final undergraduate year dated 8 March 2008, I re-discovered the following description for a possible second project:

Excerpt from an unused project proposal. © copyright Zak Waipara.

My first project (for third year) ended up being an animated music video, the second became a series of animated logo motion graphics in the style of corporate idents. Though I don’t recall writing the above excerpt, it is a very close (though not exact) description for my Honours project Recollect (which I began some four years later). The only thing missing was an intention to use remix. It was also during the course of my undergraduate studies, that I encountered these two ideas, remix and deep remixability, that especially resonated with me as a graphic designer retraining as a digital designer.

The central conceit of the story in Recollect was about diving into the imagination of an unseen protagonist. This takes place inside an industrial hangar that accesses ‘ideaspace’. Ideaspace as a term was conceptualised by writer Alan Moore as a hypothetical, mutually accessible, collective mindscape, where ideas have physical form. In this particular story, this notion has been adapted as a localised ideaspace for a specific person and the purpose of entering it is to gather up a set of image sequences that represent creative memories of the protagonist. There are nine motion graphic sequences, each representing a genre – and informed in their conception and style by conventions from influential films, stories, animations and music often recalled from my childhood and adolescent years. As each memory sequence is collected, a countdown begins starting from nine to zero, effectively kick-starting a creativity reboot. The rationale behind the whole story was that we go forward creatively by drawing from the past – a key tenet of the remix manifesto.

Screen grab from the Science-fiction styled motion graphic. © copyright Zak Waipara.

When I started putting together the Honours proposal at the end of 2011, I thought I was working with a completely new concept. The previously proposed multi-genre idea must have embedded itself in my sub-conscious, percolated away in the background, and re-emerged to be re-used as the ideal vehicle to apply remix and remixability. It seems utterly appropriate that a story about retrieving memories was the result of exactly that, albeit in an unconscious fashion.