Art & Artificial Life International Competition
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George Legrady
Pockets Full of Memories II
Hungary / USA / Canadian

 

 
Pockets Full of Memories II

Conceived as an installation on the topic of the archive and memory, "Pockets full of Memories" was exhibited on the main floor of the Centre Pompidou from April 10 to September 3, 2001. During this time, 20000 visitors came to view the installation and contributed over 3000 objects in their possession, digitally scanning and describing them. This information was stored in a database and organized by an algorithm that positioned objects of similar value near each other in a two-dimensional map. The map of objects was projected in the gallery space and also accessible online at www.pocketsfullofmemories.com where individuals in the gallery and at home could review the objects and add comments and stories to any of the them.
The archive of objects consists of objects that museum visitors carried with them, for instance, such common items as phones, keys, toys, clothing, personal documents, currency, reading material, and others. The size of the scanning box was the only limiting factor that determined what could be added to the archive. Surprisingly, the database includes an unusual number of scanned heads, hands and feet, extending the archive from simply being a collection of objects to encoding it with the corporeal presence of the contributors.
The 2D map on the internet consists of 280 objects selected from the total database by the Kohonen self-organizing map algorithm. The ordering of the objects are based on the ways that the audience described them through the touchscreen questionnaire. The map of objects continuously organized itself until the end of the exhibition and the order of the final map is a consequence of all the contributions from the duration of the exhibition. This phenomenon is called emergence as the order is not determined beforehand but emerges through the large number of local interactions on the map. This is why the system can be called 'self-organizing'. Accessibility on the internet has provided a means by which to extend the dialogue for visitors, as the internet audience has the opportunity to add comments and stories to any object, and from anywhere in the world. Many visitors who have traveled from other geographical areas have used this as a means to make contact with friends and family back home who then have added their own responses.
Produced in collaboration with Dr. Timo Honkela, Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki (application of Kohonen self-organizing map algorithm), c3 center for Culture and Communication, Budapest (touchscreen data collection, hardware and software). Design and visual identity by Projekttriangle, Stuttgart and web software development by CREATE, UC Santa Barbara. With the financial assistance of The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, Montreal, Canada, the Centre Pompidou and UC Santa Barbara.
"Pockets full of Memories" is the latest installation work in a series begun in the early 1990's dealing with the topics of archive, cultural identities, audience contribution and technological processing of information. Two works that closely relate to this current project are "An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War", first exhibited in 1993 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco and "Equivalents II", first exhibited at the International Center of Photography, NY in 1994.


BIO

George Legrady Studio
George Legrady holds a joint faculty appointment in the Media Arts & Technology graduate program and in the Department of Art Studio. George Legrady Studio provides the focus for the research and practice component. Projects integrate interactive art installation, collaborative narrative development, data visualization through semantic categorization and self-organizing algorithms. Emphasis is on aesthetic research through the implementation of complex technologies for new forms of content, narratives and analysis.
George Legrady Professor of Interactive Media at the University of California, Santa Barbara holds a joint appointment in the Media Arts & Technology graduate program and the department of Art Studio.

Research Focus
My current artworks are realized as screen-based interactive installations primarily presented in fine arts museums. The Research & Development activities focus on real-time, digitally processed interactive installations that incorporate a number of specialized interests concerned with the intricacies of information processing as mediated through databases, camera and computer technologies. Primary focus has been the investigation of semiotics, narrative development and metaphor in interface and data structure design. This involves the conceptual design and production of databases and archives of cultural material to be used for narrative plot development; and the implementation of neural net based, and other forms of self-organizing algorithms as a means for semantic categorization of the data. These are then presented either through digital publication (cd-rom, DVD, internet) or else in real space interactive installations. Mixed realities interaction design (the interface at the intersection of real and virtual spaces), include integrating the audience’s presence and movement through motion sensing technologies as a means to influence the content selection process in the digital artwork.

Analog to Digital
Prior to my involvement with computer based research begun in the early 1980’s, I was involved with formal, conceptual, and theoretical models to examine the conventions of another technological representational medium: the photographic image. The semantics of photographic representation and the production of cultural and syntactic meaning generated through the photograph’s mechanical and technological visualization were the key topics of these investigations. These include archaeological or archive classification, sampling and fragmenting of information, recontextualizing found materials, strategies of linguistic and semiotic structuring, the analysis of cultural narrative construction and other modes of information management that have entered art practice through the conceptual art movement of the 1960’s. Artistic methods of that era that have served as references for my current work include archive classification work, algorithmic based instructions, some conceptual artists' conditional propositions and narrative systems, and the socio-political investigations of artworks that engage in critical discourse.