Memory Feedback

I happened to stumble upon (lit­er­ally — I was using the new Stumb­leThrough fea­ture of StumbleUpon) this won­der­ful Flickr col­lec­tion. In this set, Michael Hughes cap­tures a vari­ety of pop­u­lar tour­ist sites and super­im­poses souven­irs in photo in situ. What a neat concept. I am sure this opens up all sorts of won­der­ful ques­tions for the representationalists…it reverses the nor­mal memory pro­cess, by phys­ic­ally insert­ing memory into the present scene to cre­ate a rep­res­ent­a­tion of memory itself. Its almost a form of memory feed­back. In this case, the kis­chier the bet­ter and pos­sibly the less real­istic the ini­tial imposed memory object, the more mem­or­able the sub­sequent arti­fact actu­ally becomes. Its kind of twist­ing truth in on itself. I’ll have to think about this one some more.
The pho­to­graph­ers idea (and there may have actu­ally been earlier inspir­a­tion for him) has sparked a whole series of inspired works in Flickr. Search­ing for Michael Hughes finds a vari­ety of pics his concept has inspired.