Digital Project: Memory Eternal
Becoming Memory Eternal by The Decameron Collective, is an AI generated, single user Virtual Reality.
This digital project investigates many different personal experiences, such as grief and loss at many different scales, while it all centers around the question: “In the wake of crises, what do, and should we remember, and how?”
They use the Ukrainian translation, “Вічная Пам’ять”, because it invokes a new emotion within viewers, it is foreign to many and puts them in an unfamiliar space.
“Named after the Ukrainian Orthodox prayer for the dead, the Canadian feminist Decameron Collective’s Memory Eternal (Вічная Пам’ять) is a single user Virtual Reality work designed for Quest 2 featuring seventeen distinct storytelling works including 360 video, interactive and spatialized sound, AI generated images and video, film, and text. Set in a surreal and watery landscape, the works investigate our shared experiences of grief and loss at personal, societal, and planetary scales. The design of the world, and the works in it, center around the question: In the wake of crises, what do, and should we remember, and how? The journey through the world takes interactants through experiences of mourning, sitting with, and awakening to new futures.” (Memory Eternal)
The digital project has a psychological feel due to the many different personal experiences and feelings that are involved within the experience. Feelings in general, even more so grief and loss, can take a heavy toll on our mental, and can even change who we are as people. It truly focuses on memories, specifically of those that we’ve loved that are longer with us, hence the name “Вічная Пам’ять”, that translates to, “Prayer for the Dead.” Dealing with memories goes hand in hand with the emotions mentioned, truly having a psychological focus.
The Decameron Collective is a Canadian group of nine scholars, Caitlin Fisher, Monique Tschofen, Kari Maaren, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Jolene Armstrong, Angela Joosse, Lai-Tze Fan, Siobhan O’Flynn and Kelly Egan, who developed this project in March of 2020, right at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. They created this AI generated Virtual Reality to give users an opportunity to utilize their platform without exposing themselves to the harms of COVID-19.
Memory Eternal by the Decameron Collective. (2024). My Site 1 .