V&A Memory Palace

V&A Gallery

Going to the V&A was  great,  i had been there a few times before but i had been a few years since i was last there. The day started with everyone meeting at the Serpentine Gallery which was a very impressive piece of architecture which gave me an idea to start of my sketchbook. 

                                        The Serpentine                       First page of my sketchbook 

After a good half an hour at the Serpentine i went down to the V&A Gallery. Quite a lot of the pieces on show had not changed since the last time but the recommended rooms in the handbook gave me the opportunity to see what i had not the last time i was there. I started with "making it up: photographic  fictions" In this exhibition it is a showcase of photographers creating stories though the medium of photography. Some of the pieces dating back to the 19th century created by people such as Julia Margret Camron and Oscar Gustav Reilander and more recently pieces by Hannah Starkey.

                                                        The Couch (Hannah Starkey 1997)

The Memory Palace 

the memory palace was a really unexpected surprise, i had never been to an exhibition where it tells a story as you go though it. A quick summary of the memory palace its about a man living in the aftermath of a black out, he is imprisoned for trying to keep knowledge alive as he believes its the only way to move forward and rebuild, but other people who are leaders of the new society have created a ban on any information as they believe it was information that caused the blackout in the first place. The protagonist is imprisoned for knowing all of this information and creates a memory palace in his cell where he stores all the different pieces of information. Thought out the exhibition you are introduced to lots of new terms which are used to describe events  like "the withering" and "the wilding"  the withering is used to describe the event which caused the blackout and the wilding is used to describe how some people believe that humanity will become extinct and the world will return to being wild. 

Some of the best moments in the Memory Palace was seeing how people interpreted worlds like internet, hospitals and recycling. You are shown that the people of this world believe the the word internet means source of information so the protagonist is frequently called a internet throughout the story. Other examples are when the protagonist is trying to put together pieces and find out more information on the old world but does not quite get it, hospitals he believes are carts pulled by four foxs that go around looking to help people and that recycling was a religious practice. 

 Here are two pictures of the protagonists interpretation of a hospital 

A museum 

There where more things in the exhibit that i could not get pictures of and one of them was probably my favourite of them all, a picture of a periodic table where in the middle all the chemicals where falling out of place and being lost which i guess was to represent the information being lost over time.