Memory Improvements Print

This artwork is a mixed media piece, assembled from photographs of peeling paint on plaster, digital painting, and cut up lines of text. “Memory Improvements” is about unconscious fabrication of memories, which has always been part of human nature but under the influence of social media has reached extreme heights. The fabrication starts out as a conscious activity intended to impress one’ social circle and even oneself, but gradually the fabricated memories are unconsciously absorbed by the fabricator as the truth, and consolidated into long term memory. In such cases one’s memory capacity deteriorates by virtue of being polluted with too many false elements. The desire to preserve memory is betrayed and the individual’s personality becomes, unknowingly, torn between two diverging goals: improving memory and enhancing one’s image. It may be that in the future some will find, a little too late, that they do not really have faithful records of what happened in their lives, perhaps painfully missing that information.