MEMORY

The best thing about memory, at least from an artistic perspective, is that it doesn’t work particularly well. Each act of remembering is not a replay, but a reenactment.

The past is a fiction. As such, it is subject to all attendant narrative clichés, like the one about the past being a fiction. As Gaston Bachelard puts it in The Poetics of Space, “our past is situated elsewhere, and both time and place are impregnated with a sense of unreality.” This unreality accounts for contradictory memories and for the artistic potential that comes with them.

With modern technology it’s easier than ever to find photographic proof and break off the fictions subtly evolving in one’s mind as the time passes. Next time you can’t remember the curve of the street you grew up on, don’t type in the address, at least not right away— allow yourself to make a new image out of the surviving material—it definitely won’t look exactly like that street, but it will be your street and a completely new one at the same time.

ASSIGNMENT 1: HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER

Pick a memory from the summer and try to capture it with pictures and words.

You may not use any photo reference until you're done with the sketch part of the assignment. Allow yourself to be as inaccurate as you please, and pay attention to the shortcuts and decisions your memory is making.

Possible directions:

• an illustrated sentence

• a comic panel with a caption or dialogue

• visual diary

• first-person perspective

• a reconstructed scene from memory

• a stylized interpretation of an event

• a dream

• a scene or an object of significance

Format: 5x5”