MOL
MOL (2018) takes up the ancient technique of memorizing information by placing symbols and signs along a mental path through an imagined house from room to room. Interested in the way technology affects both our sense of and need for memory, Nymann attempts to capture her own active and associative thinking by reconstructing her path through her abandoned childhood home. In the work, she visualizes her past experiences through the placement of anchor objects—which, according to the ancient Greco-Roman method of loci, shape the way we perceive the external world—suggesting that in our increasing reliance on technology to memorize for us, we allow others to form our view of the world.

朱利安·奥利弗
줄리안 올리버
ג’וליאן אוליבר
ジュリアン・オリバー
Джулиан Оливер
Levelhead
FILE FESTIVAL
LevelHead is a spatial memory game. The game takes its inspiration from the “Philosphical Toys” of 18th/19th century Europe and the memory systems (“memory loci”) of the ancient Greeks. levelHead uses a hand-held solid-plastic cube as its only interface. On-screen it appears that each face of the cube contains a little room, each of which are logically connected by doors. In one of these rooms is a character. By tilting the cube, the player directs this character from room to room in an effort to find the exit. Some doors lead nowhere and will send the character back to the room they started in, a trick designed to challenge the player’s spatial memory. Which doors belong to which rooms? There are three cubes (levels) in all, each of them connected by a single door. Players have as a goal to move the character from room to room, cube to cube, in an attempt to find the final exit door of all three cubes. If this door is found, the character will appear to leave the cube, walk across the table surface and vanish. Then the game starts over.