Over the next few weeks, we will be highlighting some of the many outstanding projects by 2017 Alumni Scholarship Award winners. First up is MFA Photography, Video and Related Media student Alex Hovet on her External Memory Devices project, a multimedia installation that examines the new scientific process of encoding a person’s digital files within DNA.

Tell us about your project. What inspired the idea?

External Memory Devices is a body of work that examines the convergence of physical and digital memory by questioning the emerging scientific process of encoding our digital memories within a DNA archive. Scientific teams, many funded by commercial and industrial corporations, are taking the binary 1s and 0s of digital files and translating them into the ATCG sequences of DNA, promising a durable, long-lasting site for memory storage. My thesis project, a multimedia installation of video, photographic prints and sculptural objects, questions the safety and potential of our collective memories being housed by corporations outside of our bodies. Constructing representations of DNA storage and its impact on our physical selves, I investigate the attempts to condense our biology in order to immortalize our data.

This project evolves from my ongoing investigation into the instability of physical memory, which began after my father suffered a cerebral hemorrhage over 10 years ago, causing persistent short-term memory loss. After initially making work explicitly exploring the relationship between my father’s memory and my own, I began investigating the process of digital archiving. The digital’s ubiquitous emphasis on remembering rather than forgetting may diminish our need to remember or even locate memory in our physical bodies. The natural ability of our physical bodies to forget certain kinds of information can allow us to evolve and create new memories. Forgetting can often be an asset, particularly when emotional memories could otherwise anchor us to a time from which we cannot move past. This idea has been essential to my understanding of memory in my own life, allowing me to feel less hostility toward the forgetting that my father experiences. Even when unhampered by the extremity of tragic and uncontrollable interventions, memory is still meant to ebb, evolve and fade.

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