Facial memory
Recognizing and remembering faces is a central human faculty, an essential basis for relations between people. We need to know and recognize people in order to have continuous relations with them. Memory both connects us with the past and enables us to live in the present. ”Facial memory”, a media art installation, explores both facial memory itself, but also how our collecting visual memories and communicating with people has changed from 1970s to this day.
Looking back from today, when we use social media both to store our memories and to communicate with people, in the 1970s we collected memories in photo albums and talked with our friends on a landline telephone. Some of us dreamed of a videophone, which might have looked quite like the screen and the telephone in this installation.
On the screen, a stream of hazy faces is going on infinitely. A short radio play can be heard on the telephone: one feels like eavesdropping a conversation, hearing only one part, something important is going on. Beside the telephone, a photo album juxtaposes old photographs and events with our social media lifestyle, such as printed Facebook postings in a photo album, beside actual photos, together with the likes and comments, to give them permanence.
Facial memory was developed in April 2018 and displayed in Helsinki in May – June 2018.