Collective Remembering
Participatory Installation
Unity, HTC Vive, Physical Interface
Collective Remembering (2018) is a participatory installation that examines how shared memory is constructed, negotiated, and stabilized through collective action. Participants individually view a virtual environment containing a structure composed of twenty wood-textured blocks before attempting to reconstruct it together.
The virtual environment also includes a single interactive object—a ball—that does not contribute to the reconstruction task. Sound in the virtual space is deliberately constrained to the soft, repetitive bounce of this ball, which both anchors attention and subtly distracts it, introducing perceptual noise into the act of remembering.
After each participant has seen the structure once, the group collaborates to rebuild it on a scaled, gridded physical tabletop board using wooden blocks. The physical grid is mapped directly to the virtual environment, allowing spatial relationships to carry across contexts. Participants who have already viewed the structure may intervene at any time to modify or adjust the reconstruction.
By presenting an action that appears interactive but has no functional role, the work foregrounds how attention, authority, and confidence shape collective decision-making. Over time, the reconstructed structure reflects consensus rather than accuracy, revealing how memory stabilizes through social negotiation rather than fidelity to an original event.
This work was completed during the SAIC Berlin Residency Program at NYU St Agnes.