Exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, April 18, 2001 to September 3, 2001
Online at http://www.pocketsfullofmemories.com

Conceived for an installation on the topic of the archive and memory by
George Legrady and Boris Tissot, "Pockets full of Memories", a digital
media museum installation that is also accessible online, will shortly
end its four month operation at the Centre Pompidou on September 3,
2001. The exhibition consists of the construction of an archive of
objects, contributed, digitized and described by the public in the
museum. The archive of objects is stored in a continuously growing
database sorted through a complex algorithm and is then projected large
scale on the walls of the gallery space. A key component of the project
is the implementation of the Kohonen Self-organizing Map (SOM) algorithm
that continuously organizes the data within a two dimensional map,
positioning objects of similar values near each other to arrive at an
overall ordered state.

There are currently over 5500 objects that have been contributed to the
database. These consist of objects that museum visitors carry with them
and include such common items as phones, keys, toys, clothing, personal
documents, currency, reading material, and others. The only limitation
to what can be added to the archive is determined by the size of the
scanning surface. Surprisingly, the database includes an unusual number
of scanned heads, hands and feet, extending the archive from simply
being a collection of objects to encoding it with the corporeal presence
of the contributors. The ordering of the objects are based on the ways
that the audience describe them through the touchscreen questionnaire.
The map of objects is continuously organizing itself until that final
moment which will be the end of the exhibition. The order of the final
map will be a consequence of all the inputs throughout the duration of
the exhibition. This phenomenon is called emergence as the order is not
determined beforehand but emerges through the large number of local
interactions on the map. This is why the system can be called
'self-organizing'. After the conclusion of the exhibition, the complete
archive of objects will be available online with detailed descriptions
of all objects attributes and origins. Accessibility on the internet has
provided a means by which to extend the dialogue for visitors, as the
internet audience has the opportunity to add comments and stories to any
object, and from anywhere in the world. Many visitors who have travelled
from other geographical areas have used this as a means to connect with
friends and family back home who then have added their own responses.

Produced in collaboration with Dr.Timo Honkela, medialab, University of
Helsinki (Kohonen self-organizing map algorithm), c3 center for Culture and
Communication, Budapest (touchscreen data collection, hardware and
software). Design and visual Identity by Projekttriangle, Stuttgart and web
software development by CREATE, UC Santa Barbara. With the financial
assistance of The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and
Technology, Montreal, Canada, the Centre Pompidou and UC Santa Barbara.