Fig. 1 My parents – and a fraction of the record we have left of them now that they are gone.
My mother had a stroke.
She would die within three months, and after a second stroke, very poor comprehension and ability to communicate will get very much worse. I cannot become an expert in caring for a stroke victim overnight, but I read enough and ask questions. We find two ways ‘in’ – song and images. The images are never of people – various sparks of joyous recognition come when we are seen in the flesh and behave like children rather than adults in our 40s and 50s. I cannot, through words, share with my mother our collective memories; I cannot do a ‘mind transfusion’. I cannot even talk about things we did a year or ten years ago – I sense the time is irrelevant; she is as likely to recall her first doll as she is on our last visit to the Royal Academy of Arts to enjoy Van Gogh’s Letters. A visit where she gently nurtured the interest of her 13-year-old granddaughter, sharing insights between the letters, sketches and paintings from the point of view of an artist, art teacher and art historian to a bright girl who liked to draw.
A mouthful of the food from Fortnum and Mason’s restaurant might have triggered her memory—we did treat her to various foods.
In defiance of the medical reports that essentially said ‘there is nothing there’, what worked was an iPad loaded with images grabbed from a number of hefty art books – 20th-century art, the Van Gogh exhibition book and pictures from the Louvre. I spoke to that part of her that I might work. I challenged her as I showed the photos to say when the letter had been written or why Van Gogh was keen to tell his brother what he was up to. And what was the name of Van Gogh’s brother? I got through Van Gogh and contemporary artists, then moved on to the Louvre.
Up comes the Mona Lisa.
‘Where is this painting? We’ve seen it. It was so small?’
And she replied, ‘Louvre’.
‘Where’s that?’ I asked.
‘Paris’, she said.
Perhaps, had my mother been in her sixties, we and she could have seen a way to cope with this.
Would a lifelong person have reached this point in under 15 minutes? Might a screen of fast-moving images offered in a spaced-out way, with eye-tracking, identify that ‘glimmer’ of recognition that would then prioritise pictures in the same set? Though who would know why a set was being favoured? We associate images with feelings, people, and places, not with a set book or date or necessarily a genre of work.
Fig. 2. I think in pictures. But have to communicate in words. I wonder if a stream of pictures, as Tumblrs do, is a better record of our thoughts?
Bell has shown how we can freeze content from the digital ocean without knowing what value it will bring.
Perhaps, at a later date, we can mine such event-sparking artefacts from an iceberg or glacier that call up a memory, as indicated above. But this artefact is not a memory and never can be. We should applaud Bell and others for going beyond thinking about such massive data collections, the ‘world brain’ of H G Wells or the Memex of Vannevar Bush.
Related articles
- ‘We are not made of wood’: Van Gogh’s apocalyptic letter up for sale (rt.com)
- What Van Gogh’s Famous Self-Portrait Looks Like as a Photograph – Megan Garber – The Atlantic (theatlantic.com)
- Automatically Augmenting Lifelog Events Using Pervasively Generated Content from Millions of People (mymindbursts.com)
- Digital content, like its liquid equivalent in a digital ocean, can easily leak out. (mymindbursts.com)
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