The Memory of Glitch

Suzanne Elizabeth Schaaf

2023 / 28 minutes
USA

Winner: Best Student Film
Recognizes the most outstanding film made by a student enrolled in an accredited educational institution.

Entanglements of smoke and pixels, trees and humans, loss and recovery are explored in The Memory of Glitch. In an attempt to connect to a ‘lost' landscape, a researcher dives into a dying and recovering forest in Oregon, U.S.A. to create a (de)composition of memory and place. While navigating through a non-linear collection of fragments of memory, and a recovering forest, the audience is guided by personal reflections on loss. Histories of past entanglements come drifting above like metal waste after a fire. Glimpses of bare soil, rock formations and mountains from new horizons. The presence of an absence is reflected in the sound of a river that never stops echoing through a stripped forest. Together we visit this 'black cathedral' in a montage of found footage, Google Maps explorations, and camera based fieldwork. The film plays with fiction and reality, like we do when we’re dreaming, and questions the relationship we have with the environments we dwell in. It reflects on how these environments are both constructed through human activity - such as planning, building, (fire)management- and through our technologically mediated interaction with it. It is in the space of digital dwelling where the inner- and the outer, the imagined and the ‘real’, meet each other. Through the forensic examination of memory in a (digital) landscape, we encounter ‘glitches’ that turn fragmented time into possibilities for re-imagining the way we relate to the environment and our past, present and future.