Timato - Time animato

An animated clock, for more info about the project go here.

Phototropic Memories - Attractor prototype 1

Phototropic Memories - Attractor prototype 1 from Claudio Midolo on Vimeo.

Addi(c)tive Bolero

here's one animation I created for the Algorithmic Animation class, enjoy it ;)


Algorithmic animation - AddiCtive Bolero from Claudio Midolo on Vimeo.

A tribute to John Whitney and Maurice Ravel.

Phototropic Memories: Stadium presentation

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here's the PDF version of the final presentation for this semester of my "Phototropic Memories" thesis, enjoy it ;)

Phototropic Memories (PDF)

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Notes from Stadium review by Hsiang Ju

The fallowing is my note of feedback, hope they are helpful.

Matt
repeated words: successful, simple, control, shape, quality
Personal reasons for making a new instrument?
What is this instrument for in reality? For personal performance?
Do you want to make it more close or more open? personal/public?
The relationship between inputs and outputs. buttons and sounds. shape

Lynn
sculpture, physical, virtual, mapping, dynamic system, data visualization
(I'm so happy that you use my suggested title! yeah~)
Why physical objects?
More possibility in virtual space, and it can put in to multiple digial output, like a book.
Strong motivation and background, clean
Fantasy of people having power as water is great

Claudio
intimate, slow down, i like, photograph, complicated
Sharing memory with a different way.
Forcing people to slow down is good.
People look like dynamic thing instead of 2d photos.
Want to see two sides of the device physically matched and synchronized

Sayoko
touching, i like, individual, memorial, event
Individual is hard to see with a drop of ink
Container's look and feel
Where it takes place impacts how it should be
Presentation of individual and collected impacts is great but it has not been reached
Display issue and make each drop more individual
What kind of feeling will viewers get, what will they think about seeing this
Time issue

Shipra
crisis, educational tool, fun, simplify, metaphor, gambling
(I like the demo)
Why is it important to understand economic at this detailed level?
How to make it fun, who are the players, what knowledge would they have before they play?
Purpose
For experts or...?

Dan
(I couldn't hear what happened during critics testing the prototype)

Suba
fun,
What is the reward of winning?
How to maintain the connection after the game
Goal? Many players? Private or public?
Collection of data from participants is challenging.
How to apply into a board game? actions in real world/ playing with cards

Eric
graffiti, mechanism, people, quality, nice
Not sure about the graffiti? Information offered?
What happens with crowdy places? Rush hour?
Openframe Work's Theo knows how to do the 3d effect easily.
Good documentation needed
Legal and security issue. Be careful.

Katrina
cool, visualization
What happens if people cheat?
A normal/ personalized ping?
Connection from ping to the web
Make it what you want it to be, not something between two media ages.
Trash cans on the street?
A project can recognized if people throwing non-recycling thing into recycling section.


Best,
Hsiang Ju


--
H J H
HsiangJu.com

John Maeda

"... all squint when they look at something. They squint to see the forest from the trees — to find the right balance. Squint at the world. You will see more, by seeing less."

John Maeda, The Laws of Simplicity

Experiment 5: Domains

Brief 5: Domains
Claudio L. Midolo
Marko Tandefelt Loretta J. Wolozin
December 5th 2008

I. Idea
The device I’m envisioning will be formed starting with the deconstruction of the fundamental conceptual basis that has always existed in photography, that of the unity of the element which captures the image and the element which stores the image. The camera I’m going to create will exist in the form of a divided object, split into two halves, each one able to perform just one specific function of either capture and transmit a visual memory or attract and play back a visual memory.
While the two halves will be displaced in both time and space they will be inherently connected to each other in remote. Until the two fragments are physically separated, some rules will control both the capture and attraction processes: for example the person who holds the capture device won’t have at its disposal an unlimited amount of captures, but an equilibrium will exist, relative to the amount of the memories captured and their effective output on the Attractor device; if the person who receives the visual memories is not ready for them or has not time to dedicate to this event, then the person who holds the Capturer will have to wait, until the other person is ready again to receive his new visual memories.
From the Attractor side certain conditions will have to be met in order to retrieve and enjoy the visual memories intimately shared by the Capturer such as silence, darkness and the presence of the person who owns the Attractor half. These constrains will be present until the moment when the two two halves will be finally physically reunited as, in that precise moment, the two parts will recognize each other, opening themselves up, letting the two persons freely enjoy the intimate sharing event. It is interesting to notice that in a possible scenario of usage this system enables a powerful interaction, that of the complementarity of experiences over the shared memories; the person who captured the visual memories will know everything about their context but has never seen them before, while the person who receives the visual memories has already seen them all, but knows nothing about their context. This way the sharing event will be empowered by the common need of each person to complete their “half” memory with that of the other.
The visual memory itself will be an hybrid artifact, inheriting main features both from the Photograph and the Video; it will live as light on a physical medium but won’t be a print, it will seem to be still while instead will move over time. In reality it will be a high speed low resolution short video, visualized as an aggregation of light particles. The number of particles will be very low in relation to the actual resolution of the captured video, in the order of the hundreds, but thanks to a visual effect I discovered one year ago the image will still be coherent, just using a fraction of the actual data provided by the original video. This visual effect I’m talking about happens when our brain, fed with a blurred image, natively adds up information to it, building a more coherent, understandable picture. This technique will solve three main possible issues, the first, that of the visualization of a visual memory, which in my mind has always been a sort of short, partly clear, partly blurred moving image in which the main elements were present, but mixed with a more confused background. The second, related to the actual look and feel of the interface, as a lens will be present on the Attractor side, letting the person who uses it play with this focusing/defocusing dynamic in order to explore each visual memory almost as a magical item. The third, more on the technical side, will be the fact that I won’t need an high quality video as an input, as I’m going to use just a fraction of its actual resolution thus lowering the technical requirements for the system to run efficiently.
This project final goal will be the restoration and enhancement of digital visual memories emotional value, ultimately suggesting a different perspective over the relationship with digital consumer tools, not in the direction of productivity, guided by the elements of speed, quality and conveniency but in that of humanity grounded on emotion and meaningfulness.


II.Form
The following diagrams illustrate the system I’m creating, from a logical point of view. I’m going to provide the possible technical solution to achieve the completion of each step.




The system will start to be built upon the conceptual and physical deconstruction of the unity of any photo camera, the unity of the part which captures the image and and that which stores it. I will physically build these two halves in order to let them meet a very precise behavior, illustrated in the next diagram.





One half, the Capturer, will just be able to capture visual memories. It will achieve this using a dedicated computing platform, the Aigo P8860 and an industrial grade hi speed, VGA resolution camera such as the Matrix Vision mvBlueFOX camera. This process will be controlled by a custom c++ application. Each visual memory after being captured will not be displayed back to the person who uses the Capturer device but will be immediately transferred to the Memory Plane, a middle dimension where all the memories shared by the two person using the device are stored, waiting to be attracted by the other half of the interface, the Attractor. A wireless internet connection will enable this communication system to work in conjunction with an HTTP server and a Database application, the two elements which enable the Memory Plane to work.



The Attractor half will rely on the wireless internet connection, either 3G or WLAN to receive the attracted visual memories from the memory plane, which will be then displayed using the Aigo P8860 LCD touchscreen.
Some rules will regulate the system, each one targeted specifically at one phase. In relation to the capture phase an equilibrium will have to exist between the activity of the holder of the Capturer and that of the holder of the Attractor. If the person who holds the Attractor hasn’t seen the last n memories the Capturer has reserved for him, then the Capturer won’t be able to catch other visual memories, until the other person gives him attention again watching the memories that were previously recorded for him, finally giving the Capturer the ability to capture again.





This will be achieved using an internet connection from the Capturer which will connect to the Memory Plane which stores the most current status of the activity of the Attractor. The memory plane will return the number of new memories waiting to be seen by the holder of the Attractor, if the number is greater than a given limit, then the Equilibrium Gate will be closed and the Capturer device will inform the use with a feedback that at that time he cannot capture anything as the other person is probably not ready to give the attention his memory deserves at that moment in his live. This feedback will be available before the Capturer actually tries to capture a memory, in order to prevent the excess of frustration which would be generated if he tries to capture a beautiful moment just to later know that it wasn’t recorded because of the equilibrium rule.
This rule just to propose a solution to the inflation of the memories captured in a visual form.





Another rule will exist, this time related to the attraction phase. Certain conditions will have to be met by the holder of the Attractor to successfully initiate the attraction process of visual memories from the memory plane.
One condition will be of aural nature as the need of silence or quiet in the environment where the attraction is going to happen. This will be achieved by using a microphone and a simple volume analysis of the environmental aural setting.
Another condition will be physical as that the person who wishes to see a memory actually picks the Attractor in its hands and looks through the lens placed in the center of the interface. This will be achieved by using touch sensors on the sides of the device in combination with an Arduino Nano microcontroller to feed the sensors data to the Aigo computer.
The motivation for this is easily understandable from this example. If a person is telling you an important personal memory you want to look him in his eyes and listen carefully to his words and not look at your mobile phone screen or listening to your Ipod, you need to give the other person your attention.





A third rule will control the way the visual memories are attracted. It works on the concept of direct proportionality between the actual physical distance over the surface of the earth of the two halves of the device and the speed by which the visual memories will be attracted.
In order to better understand this concept the following example can be clarifying. Two people emotionally close to each other live very far away one from the other. Using the device I’m creating the Attractor would receive the memories of the Capturer in a very short time. This is understandable as when two persons who love each other are separated from great physical distance they want to know about the other person as soon as possible. The opposite scenario would be two persons who, again, are emotionally linked, but lives in the same house. The Attractor will attract the visual memories of the other person with a very slow pace, receiving them at a much later time than they were actually captured. This is very human too as when you live 24-24/7-7 with another person, even if you love him/her, you are always updated on what’s going on in his life, thus receiving immediately something so quotidian would just diminish its true value, while receiving it at a later time would enhance it.
This will be technically achieved using a mix of GPS and internet technologies. Both the devices will always keep the Memory Plane updated with their most current position on the surface of the Earth. The Memory Plane will inform then one half of the position of the second half and will calculate the physical distance between them. Based on that value it will set the speed of the attraction accordingly. In case the GPS is not working an IP trace-route will give the raw geographic position of the ISP server each device is connected to. This way the mechanism will work everywhere an internet connection is present.
The motivation for this rule is to enhance curiosity and novelty towards the memories a person has reserved for another person, through digital means.





Lastly when the two halves will be finally reunited, they will first recognize each other, opening themselves up letting the two holders of the two halves physically join them together recreating the object original unity. In that moment all the previous rules will cease to govern the system letting the users freely control the visual memories attraction and playback process, until the two halves will be divided again.
This will be achieved using RFID tag and reader on the devices, so they can recognize each other if put at a small distance. Magnets will be used on both devices to damp the opening of the interface. In addition to that the Attractor will have an electronically controlled locking mechanism. After the two halves have recognized each other via RFID the lock on the Attractor will unlock, revealing the magnets put on the side of the frontal aperture which will exactly match in shape and position the other two magnets put on the frontal aperture of the Capturer. When the magnets in the first half touch those on the second half they will link the two halves together, reconstituting the original unity. Technically wise this will be achieved checking through a mini Arduino board inside the Attractor if there is current flowing through the magnets.

III.Domains Map
The following map visualizes the knowledge domains which have resulted as most connected to the conceptual dimension this projects is living within.





IV.Domains

The Photography domain is where this project took its original impetus from. The changes that the transition from analog to digital technology applied to the photographic field made me reflect on the gain and losses that these changes brought with them particularly in relation to the design and conception of non professional digital cameras. Quality, speed and convenience were enhanced while the more human like aspects of photography such as implicit value, surprise and intimacy were minimized, productivity driven design was the chosen path over that led by humanity.

“The result, as the computer industry merges with other industries, is that the optimization of the psychological fit between people and electronic technology, for which the industry strives, is spreading beyond the work environment to areas such as the home that have so far acted as a counterpoint to the harsh functionality of the workplace. When used in the home to mediate social relations, the conceptual models of efficient communication embodied in office equipment leave little room for the nuances and quirks on which communication outside the workplace relies so heavily.”1

From this point a multitude of connections spring to the other three domains. First Psychology, as the devices I’m focusing my critique upon are non professional cameras, tools which are used not to capture an image for profit, but just for its implicit emotional value, personal memories which the Psychology domain organizes as Explicit memories:

“Explicit memory is the conscious, intentional recollection of previous experiences and information. We use explicit memory throughout the day, such as remembering the time of an appointment or recollecting an event from years ago. Explicit memory involves conscious recollection, compared with implicit memory which is an unconscious, non intentional form of memory. Remembering a specific driving lesson is an example of explicit memory, while improving your driving skills during the lesson is an example of implicit memory.”2

A sub category of explicit memories touches more in depth the material non professional, personal photography works with, that of Declarative memories:

“Declarative memory is the aspect of human memory that stores facts. It is so called because it refers to memories that can be consciously discussed, or declared. It applies to standard textbook learning and knowledge, as well as memories that can be 'travelled back to' in one's 'mind's eye'. It is contrasted with procedural memory, which applies to skills. Declarative memory is subject to forgetting, but frequently-accessed memories can last indefinitely. Declarative memories are best established by using active recall combined with mnemonic techniques and spaced repetition”3

Declarative memories comprehend both Semantic and Episodic memories, with the latter being the ultimate link between the domains of personal Photography and Psychology, defined as:

“Episodic memory is the memory of autobiographical events (times, places, associated emotions, and other contextual knowledge) that can be explicitly stated. Semantic and episodic memory together make up the category of declarative memory, which is one of the two major divisions in memory. The counterpart to declarative, or explicit memory, is procedural memory, or implicit memory.”4

A connection to a different domain emerges after the analysis of how these memories living in the form of digital photographs are captured, consumed and shared, a connection to the massive field of Cultural Studies, in particular to the Material Culture subfield:

“Material culture study is, therefore, the study through artifacts and other pertinent historical evidence) of belief systems--the values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions--of a particular community or society, usually across time. As a study, it is based upon the obvious premise that the existence of a man-made object is concrete evidence of the presence of a human mind operating at the time of fabrication. The common assumption underlying material culture research is that objects made or modified by humans, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, reflect the belief patterns of individuals who made, commissioned, purchased, or used them, and, by extension, the belief patterns of the larger society of which they are a part.”5

Looking attentively with a fresh eye at the way digital personal pictures are captured, consumed and shared, it is possible to identify the specific patterns the previous definition refers to, specifically related to our contemporary society. Pictures can be captured one after the other in an, almost, infinite sequence, just partly limited by the amount of, ever growing, digital space each camera comes equipped with. As a consequence it is common to notice how many different pictures are taken of the same subject, in the search of the “perfect” shot, the one who represents the idealized version of the actual, real thing photographed. This leads to the first consequence of inflation. As many pictures can be taken and discarded, the implicit value of each one is greatly diminished. A second consequence would be the proliferation of artificial versions of personal memories, consciously built to represent the “perfect” version of the captured event.

Disposable perfected memories seems a tight but coherent definition of such panorama.

Going on to the second point of this analysis, how these disposable perfected memories are actually consumed? Well they are instantly consumed, as soon as the picture is taken is immediately displayed back to the person who captured it who enjoys it for some seconds before storing it on the camera hard drive, ready to be shared with the rest of the world.

Disposable perfected immediate memories is the updated definition of such panorama.

Lastly, how these memories are shared? Thanks to the advancements of the web technology the most popular trend in digital photographs sharing are those web sites which enable each user to deliver his images, virtually, to the rest of the world.

Disposable perfected immediate world delivered memories is, not only the definition of such panorama, but also a hint to the direction our society has been carefully pointed to, a direction which leads to a place where everything is fast, easy, painless, cheap, effortless, comforting, ready to be consumed, but totally and desperately deprived of the value of humanity... a path to self destruction.

“Successful interaction design requires a shift from seeing the machinery to seeing the lives of the people using it. In this human dimension, the relevant factors become hard to quantify, hard to even identify. This difficulty is magnified when we try to look at social consequences. Will the computer lead to a world in which our concept of individual privacy is challenged or changed? Will online addiction become a social problem to rival drug use? ... ”6

As a designer, paradoxically as it may sound, the only way I can react to such a situation saturated with “wrong” objects is to create a new one, a Post-optimal Object whose conception and design follows the perspective Anthony Dunne illustrates in the seminal Hertzian tales:

“The position of this book is that design research should explore a new role for the electronic object, one that facilitates more poetic modes of habitation: a form of social research to integrate aesthetic experience with everyday life through “conceptual products.” In a world where practicality and functionality can be taken for granted, the aesthetics of the post-optimal object could provide new experiences of everyday life, new poetic dimensions.”7

The device I’m envisioning lives within the intersection of the four major domains I’m taking into account: Photography, Psychology, Human Computer Interaction and Cultural Studies; it precisely resides in the tiny, but incredibly fertile design territory determined by Episodic memory, Personal digital photography, Slow technology and Material culture. The object I’m going to create will be designed to counter attack the current design trends in the digital non professional photographic field. First of all it won’t be user friendly, will be neither comforting nor consumable. The person who uses it will have to take a risk and sacrifice some of its time in order to commit to the experience the device proposes. A precise set of rules will be in place in order to re enact in the system I’m creating the same pattern that always appears in any respectful human to human interaction, a pattern which can be synthesized by the following statements:

When one person tells something important to another person, one person talks and the other listens and then, if needed, reacts.
When one person tells something important to another person, the two persons commit to the event, giving each other their attention.
When one person tells something important to another person, the setting surrounding the event needs to be adequate to the intimacy of the moment.
When one person receives the attention of the listener, it needs not to overflow the listener with information, but proceed step by step, respecting an implicit equilibrium in the discourse.

Ultimately the device I’m creating won’t let the user perform but rather feel.

V.References

1 Dunne A. Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design, (1999), 2.

2 Kolb & Whishaw: Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology, (2003).

3 Tulving, E., & Schacter, D.L. Priming and human memory systems. Science, (1990), 301-6.

4 Tulving, E. Precis of Elements of Episodic Memory. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, (1984), 223 – 268.

5 Schlereth, Material Culture Studies in America, (1982), 3.

6 Winograd T. From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design, Stanford University, (1997),
http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/acm97.html

7 Dunne A. Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design, (1999), 20.


VI.Credits
An immense thank you to Katherine Moriwaki for the support.

Experiment5 - Domains (PDF)

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Experiment 4: User scenario

Brief 4: User scenario
Claudio L. Midolo
Marko Tandefelt Loretta J. Wolozin
November 23rd 2008


I. Diagram
The following diagram illustrates the various components of the Lossy Light Memories prototype system from a logical and technical point of view.



User scenario

To Claudio Midolo
PathosCam , Inventor
Myrtle ave, 11206, Brooklyn, NY

Hi, my name is Ricardo Villareal, I’m a young film director from Buenos Aires and I’m writing this letter to you, as you’re the person who invented the PathosCam, in order to express my feelings about it and report my experience using the device you created. Everything started when, surfing on the Internet on the photography and film blogs I usually check to be updated on all the novelties in the field, I casually encountered a link entitled: ”PathosCam, a camera for two”. That title stimulated my curiosity as I was trying to imagine what that could possibly mean! Reading the blog post it was clear that it was a device to be used by two emotionally linked persons, in order to capture their memories and emotion in a visual form and remotely share them being sure that their memories would be directed just to the other person and not to anyone else. I was kinda confused by that article, but I was also so intrigued by the magic-like aura surrounding the device that I decided to give it a try; I googled PathosCam and arrived to your website where I finally understood the project more in depth: the PathosCam is like a camera cut into two halves, the Capturer and the Attractor. The person who holds the capturer is able to capture its visual memories in form of a “breathing photo”, which, as soon as it is recorded, is immediately transferred to a middle plane in between the two halves called Memory Plane, a digital space where all the memories shared by the two users float in time. I also understood how the Attractor side can attract these visual memories and display them back to the holder of the Attractor, in a very special, almost magical way. I spent quite more time understanding the rules that controlled this system as the Equilibrium gate, the Environmental and Presence conditions, and the Rule of distance, which controlled the speed of the attraction of each new memory based on the actual physical distance between one half and the other, it was tough but after a while I got it! The more I was diving into the details of your idea, the more I was captured by it, so I decided to go on and order one of these PathosCam for myself.

I chose the wood block I wanted it to be carved from and I picked one that was remembering me of the wooden tiles that used to be on the floor of my parent’s house in my childhood, I don’t know why, but I was just attracted to it! I chose the names to be put on the two small metallic plates which will identify each half as “Ric” and “Nina”, I won’t tell you why I picked that name, is enough to say that Nina is a very important person for me. Next the hard part... I must confess I was expecting something cheaper, but I guess you have to invest something more than what you would spend for a normal digital camera in order to have it manually crafted and with such special kind of features. It was nice from you to inform me that the process would have taken more than a month in order to actually build and test my PathosCam, but I was more than happy to wait as you know, the more you wait the best it is when you finally get it! I remember then, the day when it finally arrived... it was such a surprise! I opened the box and found it... I must admit I was expecting something smaller... but it was so strange looking and so beautifully crafted that I just fell in love with it almost immediately! I followed the instructions to set it up and after some twenty minutes everything was up and running, in test mode.

I was able to use the Capturer part, named “Nina”, to grab some images while the Attractor half, “Ric”, was immediately attracting them and showing them back to me, how strange and beautiful they were! They looked like a pulsing stream of light carrying back to me my memories from the past, I was really surprised by it. After one hour spent playing with it, checking everything was working fine, time arrived to exit test mode and switch to Memory mode. I pressed the specific toggle at the bottom and suddenly the two boxes lit up to then slowly get dark again, that was the signal telling me the Memory mode was active. The next day Nina arrived at my apartment and I told her I had a gift for her, I said it was an Attractor for our memories. She looked at me like she was talking with a crazy man, but she was also very curious about it. She started to believe me as soon as I showed her the PathosCam; I explained her how the system would work and what we would be able to do with it and she was immediately into it, she took the Capturer , opened it up and closed it. As soon as she closed the Capturer’s doors a light filtered through them and she felt a vibration through her hands. I told her that was the signal saying that she had just successfully captured a memory of us!

She wanted to see it immediately on the Attractor, but I explained her that the Attractor was sensitive to the actual distance of the two halves; as the memory was captured while the two pieces were very next to each other, it would have been attracted with very low speed, thus it would arrive to the Attractor at a much later time. She was confused by it and said she wanted to see it immediately I said her the only way to see it immediately was to physically join the two halves, she agreed and when we recomposed their unity we were able to see the memory she had just captured in the form of mesmerizing light particles. In three days I had to be in Sicily to work on a documentary about the sicilian immigrants who migrated to Argentina during the 19th century and Nina really liked the idea of putting the PathosCam at a test for the following three months while I working there in Italy.

Three days later, at the airport, I kissed Nina and then proceeded, giving her the Attractor “Ric” while keeping for me the Capturer “Nina”. I reminded her how important were her for me and assuring her that if she prepared the right conditions in the environment where he wanted to use the Capturer, she would be able to attract the memories I reserved for her for sure. We kissed and then I took the airplane which would have taken me to Palermo, the main city in Sicily. I passed the next months working on the documentary and capturing many memories for Nina... some of them were beautiful places, people I met, details, or just something that was touching my feelings. I just had to open the Capturer’s doors to let the memory come in and close them, I felt a vibration and saw the light, I knew I got it!

My only concern was whether, without any kind of viewfinder or compositional tool, I had really recorded what I wanted to and not something else! Just one day I wasn’t able to open the doors! That was crazy, I was thinking the device was broken, but suddenly I realized that some time before I read on the instructions that that event can happen, specifically when the other person hasn’t seen the previous ten memories you’ve sent her. Probably Nina was busy during the previous days; the next day I was able to open the device again, Nina was ready for my memories again! Finally arrived the day I could finally get back to Buenos Aires, during my time inn Italy I learnt how Sicily could be beautiful, but just for a short period of time.

I was so excited to see Nina again. She was at the Ministro Pistarini waiting for me, and I couldn’t have been imagined a better person to wait for me at my arrival. We arrived home and, we spent some time as we weren’t spending for three months... you know! We woke up the next day and I was dying to see the memories I captured for Nina! She told me that initially she had some difficulties to make the Attractor work as she had to find the right conditions in order to start the attraction process.

After some unsuccessful trials she put it in her bedroom, next to her bed. She told me how magical it was when, going to sleep, she would turn off all the lights and all the loud stuff and... ! the Attractor would light up from within and a light glow would appear inside the box! Then she knew it was starting to attract some new memory from me, so she used to took it and held it in her hands, looking through the lens. Initially she would see some small “fairies” (as she likes to say, to me they are still light particles, probably this is a professional disfunction as I’m a director and I work with light...) carrying various colors, grouping in the middle of the back of the device and suddenly moving to certain spots, slowly forming a regular grid of moving colors from which the memory image used to emerge! She was literally crazy about it! I asked her if she did it regularly and she answered that she used to do that every night before going to sleep. She forgot about it just one night, when she arrived home so tired for the work that she just fainted on the bed. I told her that probably that was the time when I found impossible to capture some memories with my half, as the Equilibrium gate was blocking me because she already had some previous new memories to look at before I could send her even newer ones.

I asked her to bring there the Attractor as I wanted to see the visual memories I’d sent her during my trip to Sicily as I had never seen them before, but she replied that I had to prepare the right environment in order to attract them. I remembered her that joining the two halves together would let us see all the memories without any kind of limitation or condition to meet so she ran into the bedroom, grabbed the Attractor and came back to me at full speed, as she wanted to know all the details about each memory, as she had already seen all of the memories, but knew almost nothing about their context.

As we were putting one half next to the other we noticed they in some way synched, recognized each other and let us open them up, rejoining them into their original unity. A pulsing glow appeared, fragments of light scattered across the screen, showing us pieces of our shared emotions condensed into breathing images.

Experiment4 - User scenario (PDF)