As the political and natural environment erupted in turmoil this year, Google revealed its most searched terms of 2017, “How”. People asked “how” more than any other questions which shows our shared desire to understand our experiences, to come to each other’s aid and ultimately to move our world forward. To me, it could be a matter of the relationship between individual memory and collective memory. Therefore, we proposed a design of a megastructure in my hometown, Guangzhou, which will act as a massive container to collect the memory of the citizens. On one hand, people can ‘upload’ their memory here to make the memory unforgettable. On the other, the collection of memory will also become the city’s encyclopedia where people can come and look for an answer by doing a cloud searching from others’ memory. In the design, the simplicity of the above-ground structure with only vertical columns and horizontal voxels was intended to illustrate the ironic and unlawful use of collective memory.

Polyacrylonitrile is a material which is widely used in the clothing industry. It is also the raw material used for producing carbon fiber, which is used to reinforce composite materials so that they become highly durable. People will need to bring a piece of garments as the representation of a memory to produce carbon fiber threads. By blending photosensitive fiber with the threads, weaving and curing, the new carrier of memory, the self-illuminated 'memory voxel' indicates the eternity of memory.  However, we also imagine the process of generating the voxels could be reversed. In this case, if needed, the owner of the 'memory voxel' could retrieve his memory by returning the voxel back to threads. 

memor-weave​:

the woven envyvlopedia of a metropolis​

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team: ke yang, qihua wang, zhuxi zeng

guangzhou, china

competition

2018