The Vertical Horizon. A series into the fear of forgetting in the Digital Age.

This series is an exploration on the fear of forgetting in the Digital Age. The aim of the series is two-fold. On one hand, to explore how the fear of forgetting is growing in our society due to different revolutions that are taking place today (from neuroscience to Digital Memory). And on the other, to explore how positive forgetting could be, in individual and collective terms, as a way to overcome our fear. From a geological perspective five hundred years is just a blink of an eye. This perspective should help us accept the fact that in the long term everything we are is condemned to oblivion. This perspective is what gives the name to the series (The Vertical Horizon) and is a crucial idea behind the two main projects in the series: One Year Life Strata (a finished work) and The Refuge (film proposal).

One Year Life Strata is a digital media project that proposes an exploration of digital forgetting and data visualization. The project is displayed in an interactive installation composed of a three-channel video and a 3d printed sculpture made of data. Wearable cameras can be seen as an extreme illustration of the tendency to impulsively recollect in our society. For this reason, I became intrigued with these devices and decided to start an experiment: I wore a camera that takes photo every thirty seconds every day of 2015. The experiment became a project that instead of “remembering” proposes a creative forgetting of my 2015. An algorithm shows the vast photo-archive piled together in a three-dimensional montage, a digital strata section. The project is therefore not interested in the individual images but in the data that it can get from them, simulating Google modus operandi and highlighting the final nature of Digital Memory.

The second project, The Refuge, is a film that mixes documentary language and fiction, and is driven by a main question: What part of our identity continues when memory disappears? The film explores the fear of forgetting through different perspectives: My own fear of forgetting (as it’s based on my personal story and the dementia in my family), the Memory-Identity equation, Historical Memory and Nostalgia (as a refuge that lead to stagnation).

Mieke Bernink, lector/hoofd masteropleiding Filmacademie: Maria Molina Peiró's onderzoeksproject heeft onze tegenstrijdige omgang met het geheugen als onderwerp. Aan de ene kant is er de tragiek van het verlies van geheugen, als gevolg van dementie - een tragiek die Maria van dichtbij heeft meegemaakt en die ook haar eigen toekomst kan zijn - en aan de andere kant de noodzaak om te vergeten in een tijd waarin we obsessief alles registeren. Onder de noemer' a research project into fear of forgetting in the digital age' presenteert Maria dan ook twee projecten.

Het Motto van Maria's onderzoek - 'we have never been so aware that our present will be a memory in the future'- verwoordt de urgentie en actualiteit van haar werk. De consistentie, precisie en perfectie die haar kunst- en onderzoekswerk karakteriseert, heeft diepe indruk gemaakt op de examinatoren die menen dat zij zowel inhoudelijk als formeer de bakens verzet van wat we gewend zijn. Het zal dan ook geen verwondering wekken dat Maria haar masteropleiding cum laude afsloot.

Rada Sesic, Filmmaker and Artistic Director ENNFF The Hague: From the very beginning, I was captivated by the poetry and urgency of the series. "The Vertical Horizon" explores questions that are clearly both personal to Maria and extremely relevant in today's society: the importance of forgetting in individual and collective terms, how technologies are changing the way we remember, the impact of ageing populations etc. The questions Maria raises and te connections she makes are truly thought provoking.

Perhaps most interestingly, María takes the discussion out of the temporary social field interpreting it in a highly aesthetic and poetic way. I believe the orginal approach she takes exploring the subject - by forgetting instead of remembering or turning digital memory and human memory into geological memory and a landscape- is what makes the series o be so significant.