Distorted Memory

Distortion of Memory; Oil pastel on photo; 33 x 23 (inch), 2012

Memories are not always so clear. They are easily distorted from the fact. This phenomenon usually occurs when I talk with my friends about an event we’ve all participated in. The problem is, our memories of the event are totally different; and this happens a lot. Distortion of memory occurs during the first step, Encoding, and it can be due to some of factors. To convey the idea of distortion and Encoding, I used an old photo of my birthday party with my parents, when I was looking at this picture I thought my father wasn’t there, but he was. Also,I made my own encoding system which will be used to remember. I painted a grid over an old family photo of my birthday party. The photo is made up of many tiny squares to symbolize the pixels in the image that I decide to pant in black and white to represent a code system. I made some pattern rules for each square. What I chose to paint over were the images of faces, a birthday cake, and the date. After finishing applying my rules on a photo, the original photo of my family was all distorted. This visual representation may happen in my brain a lot. Therefore there are so many distorted memories even if they’re really precious to me.