Sarah Zuckerman
Research Methodologies
December 2, 2013
The Sky Ending
Walk in to an enclosure in darkness, music begins to
play, the lights turn up slowly, but stay dim, the space seems infinite. Pieces
are moving from the wall, tiles look as though they could fit in a place, and
sometimes not. Slowly shifting, ever changing, in a field that is continuous.
The music remains, and you move within the environment.
There are processes of
the brain at work such as imagination and intellect that are combined with the
primary senses including vision, hearing, and touch to create memory
(Danzinger). Seeing the area, a shifting landscape of sorts, the viewer could
believe they remember this place. The music, an ambient piano piece plays
quietly, sets the mood of the work. The sound could recall a place, an event, a
time, a person, different for each onlooker. Memories are affected by the
emotions tied to the event, triggered by the musical or the visual aspects of
the piece (Rubin), it can tie itself to existing memories or create its own.
For the installation, the
novel Tinkers by Paul Harding inspire fragments of memory floating in an
expanse like tiles on a wall or floor. One of the main characters describes how
the memory of him as a person will be lost through the generations. The tiles
occupy more space in others memories now, mainly his children’s, but will
inhabit less in his grandchildren’s, and even less in the generations to follow.
This will continue until he is nothing, eventually in the same realm as Adam, a
lost generation that happened so long ago, in the eyes of those who are living,
that he seems only a myth. This idea of time and space, with tiles that shift and
disappear, influences how I think about memory, particularly my own. Having
lost my mother three years ago, I wonder how many tiles shift and change the
memory of her now that she is gone. Will she, at some point, be within the
realm of Eve?
Using the landscape of the Norway, where my family
originated, I plan to use my installation to evoke this idea of shifting time
and place in the scape of the human mind. One side will depict the landscape of
the mountains of Norway, the other incorporating the idea of the color blue.
Blue is a color of distance (Solnit), but the viewer being placed within this
room and will be in the presence of distance. The mirrors, reflecting the
images from either end, will make the area look as though it is interminable. The
viewer is placed within and far away from this blue, juxtaposed with a land that
could or could not be familiar, as the scape is shifting and interfering with
the completeness of either dimension. This takes on the meaning of how
impermanent memories are, that they can seem lost and distant yet also so close
and real, even if they have not taken place.
The title, The Sky Ending, is taken from the musical
piece that will play for the duration of the viewers’ time in the space. The
space will seem to go on infinitely, but as the spectator leaves it will end,
at least in the manner that I have a small amount of control over. Once the
environment is left behind, it may be remembered or it may not. It may be remembered in another capacity, told in a story to
someone who has not viewed the installation, and changed from there, in infinite
permutations. So while the time ends within the space the memory continues,
until a point it is forgotten altogether, lost to eternity.
Works Cited
Danziger,
Kurt. Marking the Mind: A History of Memory. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
UP, 2008. Print.
Harding,
Paul. Tinkers. New York: Bellevue Literary, 2009. Print.
Rubin,
David C. "A Basic-Systems Approach to Autobiographical Memory." Current
Directions in Psychological Science 14.2 (2005): n. pag. Print.
Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to
Getting Lost. New York: Viking, 2005. Print.
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