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The Past is a Foreign Country

Series of Graphic and Motion Posters
Language: English

The Past is a Foreign Country

Concept, Art Direction and Graphic/Motion Design by
Carlos Vin Lopes

I’ve been researching and reading some books about the scientific and emotional side of memory.
To help me in this process, I’ve started to set up some analogical (and abstract) tests with my own memory.
With some cardboard of different colors, I began to draw and create some abstract shapes, which metaphorically could connect to some specific memory, some trivial moments from the past.
After cutting out dozens and dozens of unusual shapes, some of these shapes began to represent a specific “reality”, a moment that had happened and then other smaller shapes based on these larger shapes began to represent what I actually remember from these specific moments. And in the process of giving meaning and cataloguing these shapes, I started to think about how much I remember from these exact moments, what exactly I remember, almost like a mental game about “fact” and “fantasy”, where I was trying to reconstruct some past in my mind and understand what was “real”, as an act of “imaginative reconstruction”.
In one of the books I’ve been reading I came across the term “interference”, which is basically a competition between different memories, fighting each other to survive in our brain. In reality, this “interference” is one of the biggest causes of our forgetfulness. The interesting thing is to realize how our memories are reduced to a small fraction of the experiences we have in life. How much of the past do you remember?
I like what the Irish novelist and writer John Banville once wrote:
“I don’t think we remember the past, we imagine it. We take a few props with us into the future, and out of those props we make a model, some stage set, and that’s our version of the past”

In this process of reading and researching about the act of remembering, one of the points that has fascinated me is when scientists go into depth about the brain logistics of being able to really remember something, to remember an experience, a feeling from the past.
Basically, when we try to connect with a memory, what we’re really remembering is about the last time we remembered what we’re trying to remember. In other words, we’re remembering a copy, of a copy, of a copy, of a copy (...) of that memory. And in order to optimize our brain, we live like this, remembering the last copy we tried to remember of a past experience, and as time goes by, the reality we experienced becomes more and more distant and the memory is filled with fantasy, with nostalgia, with pain, with projections we want to feel about a past that can reflect and help us in our present.
“Every time we recall an experience, what we remember is suffused with the residue of the last time we remembered it.”
With this in mind, these posters touch on this point metaphorically, about our relationship of accessing copies of ourselves in the past to make sense of ourselves in the present, to organize our experiences in a way that allows us to make sense of the “world” (internal and external) that we currently live in.
So from this premise, using some hand-drawn shapes as a starting point, I created replicas and more replicas of this shape and added movement, until I produced almost 3000 frames for the final result.

Most of the time, we get to where we are through a simple act of curiosity. We often grow up using our brain more
as a memorization machine, a way of optimizing our
tasks and objectives, but the interesting thing about these studies on memory is that it’s quite apparent to scientists that our brain isn’t exactly designed for this, in fact it’s more like a “wonder” machine. What this means is that we are essentially built on curiosity, experimentation, trial and error, and the frustration that this brings us, and on this continual attempt to try and inevitably keep failing. The term “failling” here is more directed at the feeling of trying something to make it work and it doesn’t, and the term “ try” is more connected with the feeling that even if it doesn’t work, we keep trying. And that’s why many of these scientists have come to the conclusion that for many human beings curiosity hurts, because of this essential element of frustration.
Some of these scientists say that “curiosity doesn’t actually feel good but instead is an unpleasant state akin to thirst or hunger that compels you into action to get some relief”, It’s like an itch you need to scratch.
“Curiosity is triggered when we discover a discrepancy between what we know and what we would like to know” and many of these scientists call it “information gap” Ultimately, curiosity becomes something of a motivator to seek information, rather than the satisfaction of getting our questions answered. And since society in general is built to make us feel ashamed of failing or having doubts, people start to try less, in order to possibly suffer less.

Have you ever experienced an annoying or frustrating situation in your daily life, and started thinking about it over and over again?

Often, it’s better to let the *hippocampus do its job and to simply forget about it. It’s just taking up space, and it’s not doing any good either. That space we consume overthinking can be freed up to remember and do things we actually want to feel. Anxiety and overthinking are basically synonymous.

*Hippocampus - the key area that determines whether you will remember or forget something.