Leo Dong Yiliang
How to live with memories
Memories shape our lives. Yet, if they could be erased at the press of a button, digitized, or manipulated, how would we rebuild our sense of self? When all pain and joy, regret, and hope dissolve into nothingness, what remains? In the midst of this vast, desolate wasteland of memory, how do we redefine our existence?
This narrative piece combines found footage with my own material and tells the story about a device capable of storing human memories called “Mindset.” The story follows a man who is obsessed with nostalgia and relies on this machine to experience his memories. However, when “Mindset” malfunctions, he experiences memory disorientation and becomes trapped inside an instructional video about himself. The video’s overall style is intentionally fragmented, creating a sense of time travel as if the main character is drifting through his own memories, and the visual style adopts a retro DV aesthetic, which, within this world, symbolizes the man’s social status (the higher the resolution, the wealthier the individual). As viewers engage with the piece, they are not merely spectators but may also search for their own emotional resonance within the broken and reconstructed imagery.
This work draws inspiration from my observations of urban syndromes, including information overload, urban loneliness, and rootlessness.
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