Memory / Territory

Jun 2006

Memory / Territory is an ongoing artistic proposition dealing with introspection, mental depiction of places and diagrammatic representations of geographical memory.
The project draws on a self-exploration of cognitive-mapping and psycho-geography to create an interactive 3D virtual environment where users explore narratives bound to places and re-construct stories by travelling from location to location.

This interactive piece is a prolongation of a previous work, the Memory-Map, a personal mental map covering a half-factual, half-fictional territory that is derived from the physical arrangement of the places it aims to represent.
By mimicking an actual transport map and adopting its cartographical conventions, the diagram provides an implicit and universal aid for approaching and navigating the computer-based piece, which can be apprehended as an interactive travel-movie featuring a dreamlike journey into psychological representations and stories held by places on the map; by moving inside that environment, the user – or more accurately ‘traveller’ – led by his own intuition and curiosity, constructs an audiovisual narrative made of recomposed sound-scapes and landscapes evocative of the locations traversed.
These geographical evocations have been built through a process which emphasises the salient features of my direct or indirect experience of a place – which may be highly personal and imperceptible affects. For instance, although I have never been to Montpellier in the south of France, I have built an identity for this place that is solely based on my indirect experience; it encompasses a rich, though somewhat bizarre, assortment of ideas: collection of anecdotes told to me by friends who happened to live there, miscellaneous oddments such as the track list of a radio show broadcasted from there, a vague remembrance of passages from “Crin-Blanc” (a popular children book set in the nearby Camargue district). Taken together, these ideas encapsulate my representation of this particular place as it is reflected in the 3D environment.