The authors engage in their project through an interactive experience and photographic manipulation, aiming to draw attention to the influence of photographs and images on our memories and our perception of our own past. Photographs can lead to false beliefs, they are “cognitive springboards” that help us generate thoughts, feelings, and new images in our minds. These elements can merge into mental pictures that are very difficult to distinguish from actual lived experiences. Technology is becoming an extension and a co-creator of our memory and consequently of our entire identity. When we transfer our memories onto devices and physical objects, we also transfer the actual process of remembering and the responsibility of remembering along with them. The visitors who enter Mnemomat and consent to the storage and use of their scanned image are photographed by the machine. Then, their faces are inserted into a random photograph of a real-life event, while the machine also adds a random date to the image. The visitors receive a memory in the form of a photograph, getting to keep a newly minted physical keepsake of a time and place that never truly existed.
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