Precedents

Our precedent for creating this project started with constructing a solid foundation for the notion of forgetting. We analyzed what it means to forget, why we want to forget, what we want to forget, and known rituals for forgetting. To first understand the types of memories we tend to forget, our immediate instinct was to examine the lingerings of visual memory in the context of the digital space. We noted that simply seeing certain digital photos, and other public digital traces of memory was enough to warrant the forgetting process of certain memories. These memories were typically denoted by intense emotions, whether that be a sadness from a breakup or a feeling of disgust attached to a particular moment of inaction. To help mask these memories in a private manner, we developed a service to help people hide away their past grievances or mishaps by creating a digital photo album, or FiLE, which could store digital memories from a multitude of social media platforms. This helped to create a safe space where people could privately sift through an archive of past experiences that they may not want to entirely remove from the digital space. This hoard-like ability was created from the realization that our growth is dependent on our past bad memories, and that the natural process of forgetting is rooted in remembering certain positively toned aspects of our memories. Thus, we enable the user to sift through their past experiences through a rose-colored lens. Through analysis of accredited documentation surrounding the topic of memory, we came to learn that forgetting is a failure in the process of recall, either recalling the memory in and of itself or of cues that are tied to the memory. To help catalyze the process of forgetting, we found several known methods to help create an obstacle in the process of recall. Of these methods, we were able to hone in on several strategies, including retroactive interference, which is known to be a method involving storytelling through a different lens, skewing the context of the memory to form a new interpretation, and thus new version, of the original memory. We were able to mimic this phenomenon by enveloping the stored memories with machine learning based alterations which help to remove a select number of the identified object from the photo. Thus, we created a service that would allow people to accept their bad memories for their entirety at a later point in time when they felt they had past the hurdle of that particular lapse of pain.