Spectra: art, memory and media

Categories: Art, Interaction, Video

The project “Spectra: art, memory and media” investigates the “spectral” memory: namely, how the mediation of image technologies – beyond memory fostering – addresses the noises and gaps that blur the registered and also create “twilight areas” that can lead to daydreams, fiction and poetic expression.

Technical image and mediation

The technical image has been debated since the twentieth century. The polemic has been on how the technical image underlines and, at the same time, erases the interference of the mediation over what is recorded. Digital technologies privilege transmission and continuous re-creation, which reinforces the concept of a memory in constant changing.

The current project contributes to the debates on the mediation effects on our life memories through a personal creative glance. We argue that a personal history, usually told through photography, video or computational images, is a phantasmagoria of the media used to create them.

Memory and archive

Looking for the motivation of such questioning, the artist searched for his family archive. Then, he created three installations freely related to places and people of his past, but always keeping in mind the influence of the technologies on the foundation of these past mementos.

The project “Spectra: art, memory and media” was exhibited as part of the dissertation project by the artist Mateus Knelsen, under the supervision of Dr. Doris Kosminsky in September, 2016.

Doris Kosminsky

Doris Kosminsky is a designer, artist, curator, and researcher. She is a professor in the School of Fine Arts at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro where she's a faculty member in the department of Visual Communication. She is actively involved in two graduate programs: Visual Arts and Design. Dr. Kosminsky also leads the Laboratory of Visuality and Visualization - LabVis.