Another set of experiments we did, was directed towards exploration of false memories.
My first tiny exercise consisted of writing a letter to Anna K (the Greek ), describing situations and evens which never took place, connecting them to Olympic games and the myth of Prometheus. Luckily, my tactics worked: when Anna read the letter, she was confused and felt is if she had a light form of dementia.
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In our bigger experiment we wanted to engage people actively in constructing false memories, which would at the same time deal with cultural memory (= memory shared by a broad circle of people, e.g. historical events, films, books, etc.). Our tutor gave us an idea to look into Stalin's famous practice of retouching of the repressed from all photographs, thus intending to erase them not only physically. This inspired us to let people rewrite a document of historical significance to question its authenticity and the whole concept of media as a credible carrier of memory. Initially we wanted to do it with Mein Kampf, to change history in a symbolical way, but Graham said that this will most likely to take us into a wrong direction. So eventually we decided to go for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as it was written 1948 after WWII and we thought that actually a number of new issues evolved since then.
For this purpose we created a website, where you can still rewrite a paragraph or two if you wish to update the history.
And hurray, I did something technical after a long break Had to refresh my humble PHP. That's why on some screens the webpage looks a bit dodgy. Still need to work on it...
I posted it on Facebook previously, so I want to thank everybody who participated! I received some interesting suggestions on topics like marriage, education, etc. If you want to, I can publish a best-of list.
The third term has started and my head is totally occupied with plans for the final project. But it takes so long to set up a framework for it. You always need so much time if you want to work with people. But, as I read somewhere a couple of days ago: "If you want to get somewhere fast, walk alone. If you want to come as far as possible, walk together."