Relevance of our Thesis: Dezeen Article

 The relevance of our thesis carries on...

"Memory is closely linked to forgetting. Before the digital era, forgetting was easy, for better or worse. Not only is it biologically in-built to forget, the analogue world around us cannot guarantee that recorded memories will last forever.
Photographs fade, film footage can be lost and media out-dated. In the past, remembering was the exception, forgetting the default. Only a few decades ago, analogue photography was a limited edition of images taken of precious moments or the everyday: our grandparents, parents, children or ourselves. By selection, these images became meaningful, carrying the story for, and of, an extended period of time, a life, a person.
Now in the age of endless digital image reproduction there is no longer a function for a selection process, and so we do not need to forget. We externalise our memories by handing them over to the digital realm enabled through digitisation, inexpensive storage, ease of retrieval, global access, and increasingly powerful software, blurring lines of ownership and making virtual forgetting close to impossible.
Hardcoded Memory is a reflection on the moment and on time itself, standing as a metaphor for the human search for meaning and continuity, while celebrating forgetting in the digital age.
Low-resolution portraits are projected onto the gallery wall, generated by a hardcoded mechanical structure which in the nature of its construction limits the selection of available images. Custom-cut Swarovski crystal optical lenses project light from LEDs, which, motored by rotating cams, move away from, and toward to each crystal lens, transforming, through diffraction, the white light into a constellation of circular projections, creating a rhythmical fading in, and fading out of low resolution imagery on the gallery wall.
All pictorial information is hardcoded into the rotating cams of the mechanism giving a pre-determined selection of what can be displayed by the projector. And while the low resolution image is lending the portraits a universal appeal, the body posture of the portrayed informs a definite era or decade.
Experiencing the dream-like imagery on the gallery wall, the visitor is immersed in a digital memory embedded into an analog physical object, reinforcing Troika’s agenda of exploring rational thought, observation and the changing nature of reality and human experience. " - Dezeen: Harcoded Memory

See the link below for the images on the website

/http://www.dezeen.com/2012/09/13/hardcoded-memory-by-troika/

{ - Some Drawings and Visuals - }

{ - Site Plan - }

{ - Programme Diagram - }

{ - Section CC - 3000mm long in its real state - }

{ -  Memory Well Section - 1700mm in height - }

{ - Memory Amphitheatre - }

{ - Formal Funerary Ceremonial Space - }

{ - Experiential Spaces - The Journeys - }

Experiential spatial video of the three main journeys through our site.

{ - The End of the End - }

Conceptual Model of Death of the physical and death of the digital memory

One side of the presentation - Video and Serial visions of the three journeys across the site

Our Memory Shelf

The projection and the the Serial Visions

1:100 sectional model through the Memory Well and Sheer Wall

Condensing the usual 20min verbal presentation into 5 min...

Some sense of scale of the size of the drawings on our main wall

Some taster photos of the final final product of the five and half month thesis. With a recharged self and camera, some better photos will follow soon. External examination on Friday, degree show exhibition opening on the 22 June - if you in Liverpool, you should come and have a look at the University of Liverpool School of Architecture - and then graduation on the 19 July. The end of an amazing two years finishing the L O N G road to architecture-dom...

{ - Final Submission Preparations - }

{ - Painting the walls, pin up boards and display boxes - }

{ - Ready to start Pinning up - }

{ - Pinned up with models still to be finished - }

{ - Final Crit Pin Up - }

{ - Crit 4 - Final Crit - }

After many a really late night and some lack of sleep...it suddenly dawned on us that tomorrow (Wed 16 May) is our final formal university crit...ever. We finished pinning up at about 11pm, after starting at 6pm.

Final submission in 3 weeks...so got a lot to do still and some models to make.

Here is a quick photo from my phone of what the pin up looks like...excluding the digital element and model.

{ - 1:200 Model - }

{ - Photo taken directly from the model - }

View down the Anti-room to the entrance to the Formal Ceremonial space in the Funerary wing

{ - The design process - }

For the last week we have been trying to get the proportions of the 'Memory Well' correct...(its now substantially bigger than we had initially (and timidly) drawn it...and 10 models later...we have a winner. Furthermore...some of the spaces along the public 'Capture' side and the Private Funerary side are becoming more exciting than we initially imagined. (Designing with models is great)

We have 13 days until the final crit... MUCH work to be done...but feeling more enthusiastic again.

{ - Interim Crit - }

{ - Interim Crit - }

The first crit with some sort of design proposal. (Rough pin up)

After a minor panic attack from the both of us in the morning, our crit went surprisingly well. The feedback on our ideas was positive, however (and ironically) our architectural creativity was lacking. This was something that had hit us like a ton of bricks the night before while pinning up.

{ - Aim for the next (final) crit - }

Define this new  architectural typology of an interface for remembrance and death and further explore and push the architectural design principles to make our intervention as exciting as the programme we are designing for. 

Lots of work to come in the next 4 weeks.

{ - Watch this space - }

{ - Crit 3 - Wednesday 18 April - }

{ - Article on 2 April - }

{ - Something to leave behind - }

Within the digital age, what is it that we are leaving behind physically?

 In the near future, we will no longer refer to BC and AD, but rather to pre-digital and post-digital. In a world where we have a second, digital persona, how do we deal with the inevtiable ending of life with regards to the relationship of our primary, physical self and our secondary, digital self? 

What will a cemetery of the future be like, if we, as a society, alter our perceptions of death through the influence of the instant gratification generation?

{ - Secret London - }

{ - Secret London - }

After a spontaneous decision to go back to site and try and get into Nunhead Cemetery before it closed this time, we tripped to London yesterday. Well worth the effort when we climbed to the peak of the (closed) water reservoirs adjacent to Nunhead to see the 180 degree view of the London skyline - a viewing spot not well known and not at all used...yet.

{ - Crit 2 - Video - }

{ - Crit 2 Feedback- }

Presenting our work at the first crit with external guests (29th Feb 2012).  Critics Jim Eyre, Melissa (Wilkinson Eyre), Jack Dunne and Richard Koeck.

Comments - define the digital element of your project, how can it be experienced as architectural space?

{ - Crit 2 - }

{ - 1984 - }

{ - People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word -}

 George Orwell, 1984, Chapter 1