This text accompanies the performance A Foot, A Mouth, A Hundred Billion Stars, which premiered at the Lapworth Museum of Geology in the United Kingdom on 18 March 2023, as part of the Flatpack film festival. It includes both the text and a film version, developed during a residency at the museum. Over 18 months, I had full access to the collection and archives, selecting objects that served as prompts for stories about time and memory. A central theme of the work is slippage – misremembering and misunderstanding – as a generative methodology for exploring the connection between the collection, our past, and possible futures.

A Foot, A Mouth, A Hundred Billion Stars combines analogue media and digital technologies to examine our understanding of remembering and forgetting. I used a live digital feed and two analogue slide projectors to explore the relationships between image and memory. This article does not serve as a guide to the performance but instead reflects on the process and the ideas behind the work. My goal is to share my practice of rethinking memory through direct engagement with materials. In line with the performance’s tangential narrative, this text weaves together diverse references, locations, thoughts, and ideas, offering a deeper look into the conceptual framework of the work.

In today’s ultra-connected world, personal and emotional narratives are omnipresent in media. This study examines how the emotional framing of second-hand testimonies about difficult or controversial past events influences attitudes. A sample of 154 Belgian participants, aged 18–77, evaluated their attitudes regarding Second World War (WWII) collaboration with Nazi Germany and the post-war repression before and after reading either the positively framed or negatively framed version of an ecologically valid interview. The narrative revolved around a son recounting his father’s past as a former collaborator joining the German forces during WWII. Results revealed a significant influence of the narrative’s emotional frame on attitudes towards collaboration and repression. The positively framed interview promoted more understanding attitudes towards collaboration and nuanced views on repression, while the opposite occurred with the negatively framed story, where participants viewed collaboration less favourably and regarded repression as justified and moral. Nevertheless, the role of emotions needs further investigation, exploring the medium of presentation of the narrative and considering the development of first-person narratives to elicit stronger emotional reactions.

Whereas the growing body of research into algorithmic memory technologies and the platformisation of memory has a media-centric approach, this article engages with the question of how users experience and make sense of such omnipresent technologies. By means of a questionnaire and follow-up qualitative interviews with young adults (born between 1997 and 2005) and a Grounded Theory approach, we empirically examine an object of study that has been mainly explored theoretically. Our study found four major experiences associated with algorithmic memory technologies: intrusive, dissonant, nostalgic, and practical. Connected to these experiences, we found four sets of practices and strategies of use: avoidance and non-use; curating and training; reminiscing; and cognitive offloading and managing identity through memory. Our results show that our participants’ use and awareness of algorithmic memory technologies are diverse and, at times, contradictory, and shape their attitudes towards their memories, whether they are mediated or not. Hence, our study offers nuances and new perspectives to extant research into algorithmic memory technologies, which often assumes particular users and uses.

The ubiquity of social media platforms allows individuals to easily share and curate their personal lives with friends, family, and the world. The selective nature of sharing one’s personal life may reinforce the memories and details of the shared experiences while simultaneously inducing the forgetting of related, unshared memories/experiences. This is a well-established psychological phenomenon known as retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF, Anderson et al.). To examine this phenomenon in the context of social media, two experiments were conducted using an adapted version of the RIF paradigm in which participants either shared experimenter-contrived (Study 1) or personal photographs (Study 2) on social media platforms. Study 1 revealed that participants had more accurate recall of the details surrounding the shared photographs as well as enhanced recognition of the shared photographs. Study 2 revealed that participants had more consistent recall of event details captured in the shared photographs than details captured or uncaptured in the unshared photographs. These results suggest that selectively sharing photographs on social media may specifically enhance the recollection of event details associated with the shared photographs. The novel and ecologically embedded methods provide fodder for future research to better understand the important role of social media in shaping how individuals remember their personal experiences.

The ongoing Russia-Ukraine war is primarily examined through official narratives, propaganda, and victims’ testimonies. However, the deeper motivations driving Russian men to enlist and fight often remain underexplored. While Western and Ukrainian media frequently attribute this to Russian propaganda, animosity towards Ukrainians, naivety, or financial incentives, these factors only partially capture the issue’s complexity. An additional motive rooted in an enduring ‘behavioral schema’ also plays a significant role. This schema is based on traditional gender roles influencing men’s decisions to engage in combat and women’s decisions to support them. By analyzing Russian social media and combatants’ writings, this research reveals how war discussions are framed by entrenched ‘traditionalist’ behavioral patterns. Utilizing Astrid Erll’s concept of ‘implicit memory’ and James V. Wertsch’s concept of narrative templates, this study elucidates not only the official narratives of the war but also the ‘hidden’ narratives that shape collective feelings and memories.

This article considers the intersecting of remembering and imagining vis à vis individual and cultural amnesia. It focuses on two artists’ films, Shona Illingworth’s video installation Time Present (2016) and Trinh-T Minh-Ha’s film, Forgetting Vietnam (2015). Time Present portrays the experience of an individual living with amnesia and further relates it to the immobility that denotes the cultural representation of the island of St Kilda (Outer Hebrides). Forgetting Vietnam questions the problematic legacy of the Vietnam War and its recollection by bridging personal and shared experiences through a portrait of Vietnam itself. Both Illingworth and Trinh use the film’s features of frames and movement to convey the emotional and affective resonances of the experiences and places presented to generate the possibility of presence. This article closely examines Time Present and Forgetting Vietnam with a focus on the films’ respective structures and thematic developments and reads them by suggesting the intersecting of remembering and imagining culturally and its potentiality for engaging with absence and silenced histories through decentralized approaches.