Visual Arts + Tech
Stevens Institute of Technology

ARK-4E: An Inquiry Into Memory
Anna Zimmer
ARK-4E: An Inquiry Into Memory explores archival practice through a tangible and interactive approach to storytelling. Viewers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions of the events surrounding the fictitious ARK-4E Project by browsing a desk’s worth of artifacts: an architectural model, fabricated documents and photos, notebooks, blueprints, soundbites, and ephemera.
ARK-4E aims both to experiment with the archival form and to critique how our social hegemony curates public memory. Not only is it a peek into the "black box" of archiving, but the ARK-4E Project also serves as a confrontation of "mnemic necrosis," or the death of memory in the Information Age, on a personal, institutional, and public level.
Be the archivist. Touch, read, hear the objects before you. Gently.


Fabrics are sewn together to represent the essence of specific memories, some as simple as roasting marshmallows during camping trips to the many hopscotches created with her grandfather to the homes she grew up in.












Certain patterns also represent members of her family, including those that are gone but never forgotten.