In Living Memory is a interactive installation and generative video work based on a 3D scans taken at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Audience interaction (interactive installation) or real-world data (generative video) dissolves the scene, visually unraveling an allegory to real-world biodiversity loss, disinformation, and rising unrest. As the image degrades, so does the possibility of future coherence.
In an era of environmental collapse and epistemic fracture, first-hand experience becomes the only truth available. History, once preserved through shared institutions and stable records, is now increasingly encrypted, unstable, or rewritten. The garden becomes both subject and metaphor—an archive decaying in plain sight, shaped by forces too vast to see but too urgent to ignore. In Living Memory offers a space to witness that erosion in real time, and to ask: when the ground shifts beneath truth itself, what remains to hold on to?
For this work, I wanted to make a piece that doesn't just depict collapse, but enacts it visually, emotionally and historically. In Living Memory is built from high resolution scans taken at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. This memory of beauty and preservation gradually dissolves under the weight of continued audience interaction. Beyond simply reiterating deeply felt environmental grief, this work questions what happens when society's shared reality itself begins to erode.
When institutional memory fails, all that remains is what we carry in our own minds and bodies. The title speaks to that threshold: a moment when truth can no longer be verified by record, only remembered. It’s a meditation on beauty, decay, and the limits of what can be known when the past disappears before our eyes.
The generative video element of this work leverages historical data from the Living Planet Index and Edelman Trust Index in place of audience interaction to disrupt the scene. During a three minute loop, data from 1970 to 2024 is used to visual the progressive deterioration of both our planet and society.
