Stanford ARTSTUDI 163 · Drawing With Code · Spring 2024
Pillars of Memory
A series of small explorations about how memory lives in objects, spaces, and digital traces.
A photograph, compressed to raw data and rebuilt as a field of light.The idea
Beneath every photo on our phones lies something deeper: raw data.
For many of us, our memories rest quietly as the camera rolls on our phones, stored as silent streams of 1s and 0s. We scroll through them, familiar faces and moments, but beneath those images lies something deeper: raw data.
This project explores what happens when we experience those memories in their purest form. Instead of seeing the photos, I’ve transformed them into fields of light pillars, each representing a random image from my phone’s library. My goal was to see just how far I could compress these photos and still recover something recognizable—an experiment in the fragility of data.
Using discrete cosine transform (DCT) compression, I reduced each photo to a 50 × 50 matrix, compressing the original down to a grayscale, low-resolution version. The result may be a far cry from the original image, but it still holds onto something—an echo of a memory.
Each matrix was then transformed into a 3D patch of light, with every pillar’s height reflecting the values in the data. I added another layer by adjusting the light intensity of each pillar to match the grayscale tones of the image. The vagueness of these images is intentional, but still, from above, you can make out a faint shape—maybe a face, a person, or a place—emerging from the glowing landscape. It’s a fragile reminder of the original photo, where even the smallest alteration can distort it beyond recognition.
The final product
See it in motion.
A walk through the installation: memories dissolving into fields of light.
The process
From pictures to pillars.
The pipeline runs in one direction, from a single photograph, down to raw numbers, and back up into light.
Behind the scenes
Image restoration.
Watching a compressed memory resolve, frame by frame, back toward something recognizable.
Gallery
The final installation.
Viewed from above, each field is a memory reduced to its most essential form: still, just barely, holding onto its identity.
Reflection
There’s beauty in memory reduced to its most essential form, yet still holding onto its identity: just barely.
Concept art
A machine dreams the same memory.
Long after the pillars were built, I wanted to see them at a scale the room could never hold. So I fed the project back into Midjourney and let it dream. What came back is not the installation. It is the feeling of standing inside the memory, rendered by a machine that never saw the original.
