Mnemonic drift : a framework for collective remembrance

Abstract

(cont.) the greater system, communicate with one another. The result is a distributed mechanism: a machine for slowing down, a catalyst for remembrance. While the vision of the proposal seeks the insertion of a greater mnemonic landscape throughout the urban tissue, the focus for the project is a single fragment of this flexible framework, the development of a spatial device that addresses issues of time and collective remembrance.

The accelerating pace of modern society and the proliferation of memorials in recent years have drastically distorted general perceptions of time and memory. Moving at incessantly escalating rates of speed in maintaining pace with technological innovation, we rarely afford ourselves the opportunity to simply slow down and appropriately engage in the act of remembrance. Society finds itself in a state of affairs in which time is becoming too fast and remembrance is perilously losing its significance. In calling for slowness and challenging traditional notions of the memorial, a new means for the engagement of memory is imagined on the public front. It is a collective system that seeks to embody the "art of public memory", creating a dialogue that transcends the mere appearance of any memorial gesture. Times change, generations shift, and memories blur, calling for the creation of a place that is uniquely a tool for slowing and remembering. It is a landscape that is mutable, changeable, and flexible, situated in the life of the everyday, a site for transformnative practice? In essence, it calls for an in-between space for an in-between time, one based on positive emotion that engenders slowness, collectivity, and remembrance while encouraging a high level of intellectual and emotional engagement by way of user interactivity. Planned is a conceptual landscape, a network of interventions dispersed throughout the urban fabric, serving as spatial reference points that localized groups, as well as passers-by, employ for purposes of respite and remembrance. The notion of recording, having very strong implications for both time and memory, is the basis for a lmultifaceted system through which visitors, as well as distinct fragments of