Collective Remembering
Participatory Installation
Unity, HTC Vive, Physical Interface
Completed during the SAIC Berlin Residency Program at NYU St. Agnes
Collective Remembering (2018) is a participatory installation that examines how memory takes shape through social negotiation rather than private recall. The work stages remembering as a collective process—one shaped by temporal constraint, attention, confidence, and the desire for agreement.
Participants first encounter the work individually, each viewing a virtual environment containing a structure composed of twenty wood-textured blocks. Each participant may view the structure only once, establishing a condition of non-repeatable exposure. While everyone sees the structure in full, the inability to return to it shifts reliance onto memory, interpretation, and confidence. Recall becomes an act of reconstruction rather than retrieval.
This condition mirrors how memory operates in everyday life: experiences cannot be relived, only reassembled after the fact. When reconstruction shifts from an individual effort to a collective one, memory transforms. What was once a private recollection becomes subject to negotiation, correction, and assertion, gradually stabilizing into a shared version that no longer belongs to any single person.
The virtual environment includes a single responsive object—a ball—that appears interactive but carries no relevance to the reconstruction task. Its soft, repetitive bounce produces the only sound in the space. Many participants instinctively attend to it, treating responsiveness as a cue for importance despite its lack of functional consequence. This deliberate misdirection foregrounds how feedback and interactivity shape attention, even when they are decoupled from meaningful outcomes.
After viewing, participants reconstruct the structure collaboratively using wooden blocks on a gridded tabletop. A grid within the virtual environment maps directly to the physical grid, carrying spatial logic across contexts. Participants who have already viewed the structure may intervene at any time—correcting, revising, or redirecting the build as it unfolds.
Many participants approach the task as a game or social experiment, expecting a correct solution or an eventual answer key. When no authoritative reference is provided, frustration often emerges. This tension is intentional. By withholding verification, the work foregrounds how strongly people rely on the promise of correctness, even when memory itself offers no such guarantee.
Over time, the reconstructed structure stabilizes not around accuracy, but around consensus. Confident assertions tend to persist, while uncertain details are overwritten or abandoned. The final form reflects alignment rather than fidelity, revealing how shared memory privileges coherence and agreement over precise recall.
Developed during a residency in Berlin—a city marked by layered histories, visible reconstruction, and contested narratives—the work is informed by environments where collective memory is continually produced, revised, and materialized. Collective Remembering does not ask participants to remember better; it asks them to notice how remembering happens together, and how individual experience is transformed through the collective process.
Interaction Logic
Participants individually view a virtual structure composed of twenty blocks, only once.
The viewing experience is non-repeatable; participants cannot return to the virtual reference.
A grid in the virtual environment maps directly to a physical grid used during reconstruction.
A single responsive object provides feedback but has no functional role in the task.
Sound is limited to the repetitive bounce of this object, subtly redirecting attention.
Participants reconstruct the structure collaboratively using physical blocks.
Participants who have already viewed the structure may intervene at any time.
The final structure reflects collective agreement rather than accuracy.
