Arts Thread

Inspired by Mia’s time spent living in Berlin, a period of time that exists now as fragmented memories in her head. Cached Memories explores memories of moments and forms once tangible and full of life as they begin to blur at the edges. Human memory is not like a video recording; the brain doesn’t simply replay events as they happened. Instead, our memories are constantly reconstructed. Each time we recall the past, we piece together distorted sensations, emotions, and details, rebuilding moments from incomplete fragments in the present. This process mirrors the nature of digital imagery, where compression, distortion, and abstraction shift the way an image is stored, remembered, and perceived over time. Along with our memories are the thousands of photographs captured throughout daily life, preserving people, places, and fragments of time that have been accumulated and stored away. Through these photographs, our memories live on. Not as tangible things, but as pixels on a screen. We are made up of our memories in the same way a computer screen is made up of pixels. Cached Memories draws on the digital aesthetic through choice of colour, pixelated imagery, and experimental textile techniques, while also reflecting Mia’s computational practice through interactive installations and generative embroidery. Employing a colour palette of only eight colours, drawn from the RGB digital colour format and the neo-impressionist technique of divisionism, stages of digital compression and abstraction have been applied to photographs before being translated into textile and embroidery pieces. This collection of work encourages viewers to engage with each piece from different distances and perspectives, allowing colours to optically blend and create the illusion of digital photographs through textiles. Echoing the distorted and reconstructed nature of memory itself.