Sensory Archival Foundation (SAF)
-speculative
-research
-interactive
-world building
An exploration into DEATH and NOSTALGIA and the escapism that comes with our grief and reminiscing.
Forgetfulness occurs regularly in our daily lives and, with SAF, we question and wonder if there are other ways to remember. To capture our days and store memories differently than traditionally recognised method.
Typically, the capturing of moments is heavily reliant on our sight. With phones and cameras, we photograph and record hundreds of moments composed in still frames, but how genuine is a photo?
How accurate a representation of a moment is this frozen scene?
SAF expands how memories can be activated and evoked through the association of our lesser exploited human senses.
Information for our foundation (click on to view slideshow):
For now this institution has focused their resources on the sense of smell. Olfactory memory refers to the recollection of odours, studies have found that memories triggered by scent are persistent and highly resistant to interference.
How much more of an authentic remembrance experience is a smelt memory than a seen one?
Smell of the war
We chose Lee Miller’s image archive as a narrative to explore our foundation’s philosophy.We wanted to recreate the scents of what had been documented in her photographs and base our foundation's archive process around the extraction of information from an image to retrieve the odour of the past.
With our own developed process(on the left), you can upload an image to the platform we created, then we use object detection to create a rough property landscape to transform this information into digital data. With objects detected, we pull out the molecule node information from each object, for instance, in this image, tire and car nodal information has been prepared - for visual demonstration purposes we have coloured the nodes with the same colour but a different saturation, the more saturated, the more prominent the smell. Following this, we overlay these nodes and reduce the odour information into a condensed summary of smell which is then categorised with labels of smell notes such as Rusty, Burnt and Alcoholic.
With machine learning(on the right) we can also tell the location of the photographer and what they would be smelling based on the size of the object and its depth of field in the image to predict its distance from the photographer, then we can intensify the smell of closer objects that are located around her.
Unlike the stereotype of time travelling, SAF doesn’t take you back to a time that once was, but rather augments a past scene into the present, with a more tactile and involved sensory experience.
How might this affect our experience of the past and present?
SAF exists within the speculation of an envisioned world. A conceptual institution that captures the sensations that help us trigger memory retrieval and mental teleportation. We have manufactured a process of perception procurement that has become ingrained in the essence of the human lived experience.
Experiment of project introduction:
2 colours riso
Printed on off-white 120 catriage paper
Animated by Lara Baillargeon