“One to Hold, One to Echo” is one of a series of projects I made while I was at RISD, focused on memory and the all the physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual ways we engage with it.

This piece was originally a live performance; I later created a standalone installation version of it. It centers around two glass vessels that I made by hand, a faceted dome and half-toroid bowl. I cut, shaped, and polished the vessels, partially silvering them like a mirror on the internal surface. I knew I wanted to project video onto/into them, so the optics of each one were specifically designed to collect or disperse light in different ways.

The faceted dome refracts its video, repeating – echoing – fragments of video throughout the space. The toroidal bowl, crafted to hold memories instead of fracturing them, gathers the video into a single focal point in the air above it before fanning the projections out again in reverse. These two directions – a fluid, distorted kind of retention on the one hand and a fragmenting repetition on the other – reflect current research into how memory works, and symbolize two of the many relationships we have to memory.

The audiovisual material is all found footage from boxes of old family videos, played and manipulated in real time through custom software.

At the time, I wrote up a whole instructables description of the project. Head there for a behind-the-scenes tour of the process behind this work.