Projects
Material Memories
Material Memories
Through touch capacitive sensing, discarded objects and narratives lost on VHS will help us re-imagine and understand their forgotten stories.
Material Memories will give touch capacitive sensing to VHS tape and found objects, in order to highlight and explore the inevitable incompleteness of memories and historical records. Here, discarded objects and narratives lost on VHS will help us re-imagine and understand their forgotten stories.
Forgotten films: Moments and memories are brought to life in an immersive installation.
As technology has progressed, stories, moments and narratives captured and held on VHS tape are now inaccessible to most. In this work, when a piece of VHS tape is touched, the video contained upon it will be emitted- projected onto the installation. These stories may collide, overlap, or simply sit with one another.
Found objects: A discarded chocolate wrapper may- when touched- explain a journey from factory to shop to the street floor; a dropped child’s dummy may show a story of being lost and being missed, or a losing scratch card can play us the soundscape of the street it was found on. All objects have stories, some will now share parts of them.
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£5,000
Aims of the project
Material Memories will highlight lost, hidden, and discarded memories and stories around us – be these on forgotten video or within discarded objects.
The Material Memories project will allow me to learn and incorporate touch capacitive sensing into my artistic practice. This will enable me to create tactile and immersive ways for audiences to experience my work. I will also use it to build bridges between some of my artistic interests, such as, bringing together older, ‘obsolete’ media technologies with new ones, or bringing together art spaces and the public realm.
As technologies progress our methods for recording, retaining, and replaying events and memories change, and the pace of this soon makes once new technology obsolete. But the recordings remain: often narratives and stories are still held upon the medium of recording- haunting us by persisting elusively just out of reach. Material memories will utilise the tangibility of older technologies to bring them back to life; encouraging touch to initiate immersive films.
Historical records are always incomplete. It is impossible to record everything, but I will try to re-imagine and restore some overlooked stories- mainly from discarded items found in public spaces. Items which often go unseen due to their proliferation; people stop noticing individual pieces of litter when there is so much of it.
Here Material Memories will highlight some of the vast array of unseen processes, systems and efforts held within all objects- many discarded regularly without a thought. The project will tell stories of how they came to be, the humans they interacted with, where they were discarded and how they got there. The aim is that these humanised items will make us consider their proliferation, and the ecological impacts of their creation, consumption, and disposal.
Meet the artist
Jenny Alderton
Lead Artist
they/them
Jenny (They/Them) is a Welsh-based interdisciplinary artist whose work often engages with concepts of self and identity, (dis)connectivity and (dis)communication, psychogeography, space, and place. They utilise- amongst other things- movement, photography, words, intervention and debris collection to create video and installation work. They are often drawn to the overlooked and forgotten, hidden narratives, and public space.
Most recently Jenny has been exploring crip time and theory, slow time processes, nostalgia and ‘obsolete’ media technologies.
