how do you remember?

As part of the Performative Technologies research group at UC Santa Cruz, we plan to design a site-specific, multi-channel video and audio installation that explores the complexities and poetics of memory and its erosion within the human brain.
We want to know how you remember.  Since we can only see inside our own memories, we need help from you to develop a broader understanding of what memory looks like, feels like, and what memories remain in our primordial safe-vault when all others are gone. When answering, try to stay away from turning your memory into an anecdote or reconstruct it as a clear narrative, and really focus on how it looks and feels as a memory in and of itself.
Answer any or all of the survey questions we will post here by sending your responses to [email protected].
Answers to this survey will be used as research for content in UCSC’s Digital Arts and New Media MFA Performative Technologies project.  Answers may be used in part or in whole, but will remain anonymous.  By submitting answers to this survey you are granting permission for the submitted information to be used in our project.
Many thanks,
h + n
Our questions for you: (if you only want to answer one or two that is just fine)
- What is strongest when you recall a memory - visuals, sounds, emotions?
- Take a moment and recall the happiest moment of your life. Describe this memory. Tell us what happened and how you felt. Also be as sensorially descriptive as you can – what did you see, hear, smell, taste, sense? 
- Do the same for the most painful moment of your life. Describe this event as visually and sensorially as you can. And what made this event so painful?
- Do you often recall experiences from the past? How do you think your memories affect your understanding of your present self and how you see yourself in the future?
- What memory do you never want to lose?
- How do you navigate through your memories?  What kind of movement do you feel when you are recalling them?  Are you a character observing, on the inside, or something completely different?
- Have you ever been completely blindsided by a memory?  What was the catalyst or trigger for the rush of remembering?
- Have you ever experienced a fragment as a memory, a single image loaded with feelings and time? What was the short image and what was buried underneath it?

Comments

, Joan Collins

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFIORuvNa9I[/youtube]
Please let me go. It hurts me so much to even write that, but there is no other way. we will destroy each other if we don't stop.  
When I was last in texas, and I was leaving for the last time, I prayed with all the feeling i had that you would be protected. I hope it works that way and you are.

, Joan Collins

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzLIZjMEQVM[/youtube]
(I used to read Huxley for breakfast!) Say! Before I got through with my argument, they walked out on us. Well, I just looks at the bartender and he looks at me, and then we laughed like hell.