Unfolded

installation Design

An installation that captures my memories from 2020–2024.

duration
jan–May 2024
4 months

my role
Art director
‍
Project type
self-initiated

‍SCOPE
Installation, photography, graphic design, handout cards
‍
TOOLS
iphone, Apple Photos, Illustrator, Figma, Procreate, Cricut, CCA DFAS Studio EPSON P5000K + P9000K Max Black Film 17” + 36”

brief

Attention to my memories in my photo library

For the BFA Graphic Design Thesis at the California College of the Arts, every graduating student must develop a concept around and push the boundaries of communication using their personal interpretation of a given keyword. In Spring 2024, the keyword was "attention." After brainstorming various pathways, I decided to focus my attention on how my extensive photo library is heavily connected to recalling my memories.

context

Over half of Gen Z takes between 10-30 pictures every single day, or roughly 11,000 pictures a year. What draws us to document every little moment of our lives?

As part of Gen Z myself, I could resonate with this as I have over 81,000 photos on my phone.

In the past, photos were taken more sparingly as film was expensive and limited to the number on each roll. After technological advancements and the convenience of having a camera built into smart phones, photos can be taken more instantaneously.

How might we create an experience that captures my life which has a great overlap between reality and photographic instances?

What captures your attention becomes your sense of reality.

With over 81,000 photos on my phone documenting my life, I heavily rely on my photo library as a reference to recall memories. Paying attention to the documentation of my life where there’s a big overlap between my reality and photographic instances encourages memory retention, through an installation of tiny photographic elements that recollect my memories.

Statistics

81,000+

photos

In my photo library, I began with 81,000 photos and ended with 89,000 by the end of the project, so you can imagine just how many photos I take on a daily basis. How might we have constraints to filter out most of the photos, but still maintain enough substance to represent my photo library?

400

images

Selected 400 images capturing my memories from 2020–2024. How many photos I should select from each year became a big question, but I decided to choose 100 images from each year, and only 50 from 2020 since it is fading in my memory, and only 50 from 2024 as it is still ongoing. I wanted to create an overwhelming feeling through repetition, but also ensure that I could manage crafting such a large quantity while maintaining quality in a limited time frame.

650+

frames

I designed and assembled over 600 frames: 400 for my installation, 240 business cards to handout at the exhibition, and 20+ custom ones for my close friends. First, I designed a template that I could apply to everything else. Since memory is personal, instead of simply only having an image, I decided to attach key identifiers like date, time, descriptor, and location, as well as record my first thought that comes to mind when recalling that memory from the present moment. This adds context to each image to represent my memories.

inspiration

¹ Film slides

Standard 35 mm film, which can be inserted into film slides
→ Nostalgia & sentimentality
→ Analog yet digital
→ Unlike the standard process of developing film, my process is the reverse: from digital to film.

² It feels like a million tabs are constantly open in my mind.

→ On website browsers, I often find myself unable to close tabs, saving it just in case I need to access it again, which ends up building up into an overwhelming amount. In the same way, I can’t delete old photos just in case because it’s tied to my memories that I don't want to let go of in fear that I won't remember it ever again.
→ Photos take up storage and memory. No one can focus on or remember 1000 things at once.
→ Extracting memory tabs in my mind into physical form

early design prototypes using Max Black Film and Cricut to cut the frames. experimented with layouts and typography to develop a template, trying to figure out how to assemble pieces and what form the final product should look like when together.

key observation

Memory is attached to you.

A photo lacks context to an outsider compared to the photographer who experienced that moment at hand. When someone looks at the same photo who was not in that experience, they don’t know what emotions or thoughts were experienced by the person who took that photo in that moment.

So I decided to make each photo personal by tracking and labeling identifiers: date, time, location, descriptor, memory note to record the first thought that comes to my mind when recalling a memory as soon as I see the photo.

observations while sorting photos

After applying the constraints that I set, there's actually not many photos to choose from. These are photos that I normally don't look at!

The constraints that I had set were just right and I ended up with many unfamiliar photos that I haven't seen once since snapping the photo.
I eventually became more lenient on my constraints. For instance, I had originally wanted to choose photos where I'm the photographer, but I soon realized most of the photos in my library are photos of me taken by my friends. I thought maybe I was being too limiting and the photos were less interesting if I wasn't in it, and decided to include some because that was how I remember that particular moment in my memory: in 3rd person.

The more time I spend there, the more personal and specific the location becomes.

I become personally tied to that place as more memories form at the same place. For example, the location: Design District, SF vs. Seoul, South Korea.
Living in San Francisco for 3 years, I became more familiarized with how each area is distinct as I can now recognize different neighborhoods, compared to South Korea where I spent the past 2 summers in. Summer 2022 started off with more touristy spots, while in summer 2023 I explored deeper into the neighborhoods and local Korean life.

I barely took photos in the morning; most start around 11am. Except during the pandemic...

The reason that 2022 and 2021 has more morning pics was because my sleep schedule was messed up during the pandemic. Since there was not much to look forward to, I stayed up extremely late to the point that the sun rose by the time I would go to bed.