The Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) Centre for Memory Studies recently unveiled the ‘MovingMemory’ app, which combines Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality technology. According to the official release, it records numerous moving memory models through digital reconstruction.
The statement further stated the app can be accessed through mobile apps (Android and iOS) or browser-based platforms, making it uniquely inclusive in quality. It is a spatial app developed with the potential to inhabit the metaverse world. The platform’s features allow users to choose any desired avatar and move across three-dimensional spaces. It has extra layers of video, music, 3D graphics, and interactive features that can be utilised as models for sustainable and heritage-focused pedagogical and research techniques.
The ‘MovingMemory’ project was launched during the second annual Indian Network for Memory Studies conference titled ‘Memory, Ecology, and Sustainability,’ which will be held at IIT Madras from September 20 to 22, 2023. The Conference was inaugurated on September 20 2023, by V. Kamakoti, director of IIT Madras, in the presence of Seema Massot, director of the American Centre, US Consulate General, Chennai, Jyotirmaya Tripathy, head, department of Humanities and Social sciences, IIT Madras and the faculty coordinators Avishek Parui and Merin Simi Raj.
Speaking about the development, V. Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras, said:
We must foreground the urgent need to incorporate collective memory in our understanding and ability to anticipate policies related to ecological issues such as climate change. Human and non-human forms of memory (such as the memory of water and the memory of nature), such as the Spanish Flu and the 2015 Chennai floods, may be studied through interdisciplinary and collaborative formats to further memory studies as a discipline.
Around 100 presenters and over 500 non-presenters attended the worldwide Conference from all around India and the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, New Zealand, Morocco, Canada, Sweden, and Bangladesh, among others. According to the press release, the Conference will look at various human-centric technologies and policies related to cultural memory and sustainable development goals in India and worldwide.
The Conference aims to connect rituals of remembering and experiencing the environment to systems of sustainability, which assume material, cultural, and technological dimensions through significant events such as disasters and floods and slow processes of change.
The Centre for Memory Studies (CMS) provides an interdisciplinary analysis of memory and forgetting, examining the cultural, psychological, physiological, and mechanical vectors that shape such processes. This research programme hopes to link to historical, social, and cultural events through the interfaces of narratives, neurological mechanisms, and mechanical entanglements, while also facilitating partnerships with industrial partners working on cognition, embodiment, and technology. Memory studies aim to offer a more complex engagement with the embedded, extended, and enactive acts of reconstruction through material markers, textual traces, and experiential events by investigating the entangled processes and politics of remembering and forgetting at the neural-machinic and extended-cultural levels.
CMS exists at the intersections of technology, medical science, literary and cultural studies as a rich interdisciplinary network of academics from the humanities and social sciences, brain science, machine studies, industry specialists, and artists. It encourages and facilitates active academia-industry dialogues and collaborations through events, knowledge sharing, research supervision, and peer-reviewed publications.
IIT Madras has established several Research Initiatives in several sectors of contemporary importance as part of its commitment to the cause of nurturing world-class research. Many of these initiatives will become IIT Madras Centres of Excellence. There are now 68 research efforts underway across 21 distinct technology clusters.
