This five year project, ‘Creating Future Memories,’ is a citizen-focused effort to identify and foster ongoing and new creative methods of regaining control of the ‘big data’ we regularly produce in our everyday lives. As contemporary societies become more saturated in digital and social media, it takes time and effort to track our own data, much less curate it in ways that might make sense for our grandchildren. This international project is directed by Annette Markham as part of the larger Future Making Consortium. It is supported by the Department of Information Studies and the Cultural Transformations Research Unit at Aarhus University. Beginning in 2016, Creating Future Memories is hosting a series of experimental workshops for citizens to think about what personal data is being collected by large corporations like Google and Facebook, and how this data is archived, packaged, and recycled back to us as if it represents the totality of our lives.This five year project is designed to find and foster innovative methods for preserving digitally-mediated lived experience of 21st Century events. Using interventionist and action research research design, it addresses urgent concerns about regaining control of our future cultural histories. The project was awarded 2.5 million DKK in startup funds by the Aarhus University Research Foundation.
Latest Updates
Speculating with predictive memory-making: The (Black) Box of Memories
At EASST, we used speculative science-fiction to think about current and future algorithms for memory-making. Through a fictional story and its analysis, we discuss the “black-box” metaphor, the business/entrepreneurial aspect of algorithms, and the conception of predictive memory-making.
read moreGlitch Memory: Raising Ethical Questions
At Godsbanen, we retell a woman’s story, one year after she donated her memory to MoRM. On three screens, excerpts and meta-conversations are mutated and glitched algorithmically to raise questions about data degradation and the illusion of the representational archive.
read moreThe Un-archivable and the Sound of Forgetting
As we scavenged through public repositories to build the base for our sound installation, we didn’t have any trouble finding stuff. But we struggled to find ways of adequately including or representing memories that are not archived, or could never be archived.
read moreStructures of Feeling and the irreducible quality of lived social experience
The “Sound of Forgetting” means leaving the commonsensical, datafied understanding of data and acknowledging there is another sense of experiences that might not be at all apparent/heard. Raymond Williams’ idea of “structures of feeling” attempts to conceptualize the irreducible quality of lived social experience.
read moreThe Sound of Forgetting: the setup
What is the sound of absence? In MoRM’s The Sound of Forgetting, we’re creating a collaborative soundscape that dramatically embodies unseen elsewheres – evoking through sound the unheard and unseen, the departed and the deported.
read moreThe Sound of Forgetting: an introduction to our process
May 21-22, 2018, the Museum of Random Memory’s latest installation “The Sound of Forgetting” comes to Cork as well as the Data Justice Conference in Cardiff. With some help from local DJs, we mix sound archives and participants’ voices to build soundscapes between the two sites.
read moreMuseum of Random Memory Spring Conference
April 6 - April 8 2018 April 6-8, 2018. Artists, activists, social scientists, architects, and information designers convene for the 2018 Museum of Random Memory Workshop in Skagen, Denmark. The goal? To bring together a unique set of trans disciplinary perspectives...
read moreMoRM: the original workshop at Dokk1
MoRM as curator of objects of everyday life
MoRM contributes to strong data literacy
MoRM exhibitions are experiments in arts+technology+pedagogy as a response to the powerful impacts of datafication and digitalization in everyday life. This report provides a project update as of January 2018.
read moreWant to get involved?
If you are interested in joining this project, send us an inquiry and we will get back to you as soon as possible!