In collaboration with Yuan Chen and Jingfei Lin
What if you could buy someone’s memory? Or record every emotion you felt and play it back exactly as it was? Would you want to?
The Memory Pill temporarily alters the biological formation and experience of memories. It operates in two states: record or experience. When taking a blank pill, users record all that they experience for 24 hours. Emerging from their belly button, the 24 hours are physicalized into a memory growth . Upon removal of the physical growth, it is uploaded to the Universal Memory Bank and reconstituted into an experience pill. Browsing the Universal Memory Bank, individuals can download, print and then ingest the experience pill of someone else, or from their own catalogue of uploaded memories. But while the potential experiences of an individual have now exploded, what does it meant to share memories? How can multiple people experience a moment from a single point of view? How is the “memory” reinterpreted? Would this enable ‘true’ empathy? Is empathy ever possible—or do we only attempt to empathize and are completely able? Swallow and find out.
Storyboard
The design fiction is illustrated in through the two perspectives: recording and living/re-living. A set of locked-down shots at the beginning (Act 1) show “a day in the life” of our main character, River. The camera is mostly fixed, and viewers are seeing the action move in and out of the frame. It doesn’t capture every detail, unlike the pill! In Act Two, they day is retold through the perspective of those who have taken the experience pill at different points in time. Viewers watch the day unfold again but through a POV shots from River’s perspective. The characters provide multiple interpretations of the record event. They provide voice-over commentary as well as are seen in fixed, stationary medium shots—filmed like an interview. The mixture of these different techniques seek to express the questions posted at the beginning of the post. What constitutes a memory for multiple people?