< The proposal of the project >
forgetting.online will aim at creating a website artwork as an online platform of social engagement, where the users are encouraged to be part of the events of algorithmically-operated forgetting, whilst learning about the idea of forgetting. The website artwork also adapts the myth of Lethe (the underworld river of forgetfulness from the Greek mythology) as a narrative device.
Currently, the website is under construction, and the research and designs of the website are being developed and shared on the Newhive platform, and Storage-Un.it that is an online/offline project space provided by Arebyte Gallery where the artist is in residency at the moment.
During the residency, Toya will research the ideas and discourses of forgetting, and taking notes of sources from various different fields such as sociology, philosophy, art and science. The artist will also be developing the interface designs, narrative and operation of the website in correspondence with the research processes.
forgetting.online explores the ways to counteract today’s near-immortal, digital memory that captures and records our online activities where the information is often not to be deleted automatically, but it will be preserved as a part of the enormous societal database we have on Internet today. And the recorded online activities, without functions of the automated erasure, could come back and haunt us when we forgot what we have done or said.
forgetting.online aims at building an alternative social media platform where users can share memories they want to forget, and these memories will be automatically fragmented and erased at the end by the website’s algorithm. The project observes if this automated data-loss may correspond with human forgetting. By doing this, the project aims to understand how we could let the Internet forget so that we may be able to forget too.
[Newhive page that shows the development and underlying research of the project]