Church of the Hyperreal (09.27.07)

I intended here to model a small exhibit stand of defunct video-game technology in which nature was depicted. I was interested in the endurance of mental constructions (what do I remember) versus the ephemerality of fleeting experience (what was it like). Using material artifacts as memory triggers, such as Nintendo’s Game&Watch game Greenhouse, I filmed a short video which illustrated what mental state was created by this exhibit stand. To show the difficulty in accessing isolated experiences, I layered footage and diagetic sound of hands playing the games against select readings of real-time media theory and music that was in my head at the time. Though at the original time of playing Greenhouse I was concerned primarily with the action of the game, my memory of it was now largely material – the feeling of pressing buttons rapidly, the form of the now defunct controller, and these memories were obscured by the salient chunks in my short-term memory.