[site as thesis].

The site as thesis focused on how memory influences experience and likewise how experience influences and creates memory. The different scales at which this interchange operates becomes the site.

First, on the larger scale, memory is influenced by a collective experience. Culturally and socially shared pre-dispositions, prejudices, and preferences combine to color the perception of events, places, and people, and thereby color memories of those moments. The notions passed from person to person within the social network form a memory map through society, with each individual as a node of transmission.

Next, on an individual scale, memory is shaped through each unique experience. As recollection occurs, the mind sorts through the cloud of memories in storage. The first layer of recollection achieved is association. When an experience/place/person is recalled, associations are first made- was it a joyous or negative experience? Next, more specific details about the experience come to life- how did the situation play out, what actors were present, what nuances change the course of events? Finally, the deepest level of the memory is where negative feelings reside (perhaps as a level of protection for the body). Certain memories reside too deeply to even be recovered clearly.

Junk Drawer: the junk drawer represented a physical site for memory, contained in two parts. One, the objects contained, and two, the mental associations with those objects. The relationship between object and memory, the physical with the mental, is what I'm hoping (at this point anyway) to pursue architecturally.