UCLA Students Help Pass the Time in "Memento Vivere"
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What will public art look like in the future? Earlier in the year, sixty UCLA students participated in an improvisational performance that contributing to this digital clock face, a project that has taken on more meaning as time has gone by.
Title: Memento Vivere
Presented by: CAP UCLA
Originally Published: June 29, 2020
Created by: Chris Doyle
Students pictured in the clock: Brendan Thompson, Sahej Verma, Carl Hatch, Kiani Wish, Kennedy Hill, Leah Stofko, Sonia Hauser, Urna Bajracharya, Kai Watanabe, Marissa Perez, Sangmi Lee, Dario Apodaca, Lauren Mitchell, Kamilla Collins, Danielle Koenig, Emmet Abrams, Sruchi Patel, Paulina Panas, Natalia Trejo, Nolan Kim, Tyler Chiu, Luis Cortes, Hamidreza Sanjabi, CJ Zepeda, Gavin Aleshire, Audrey Ruiz, Jade Box, Max Gordy, Rebecca Tokofsky, Keanu Balani, Isabella D’Agnenica, Ruby Lake, Scott Schweitzer, Isabella Bustanoby, Andrew Lee, Daniel Leka, Tianyi Song, Fiona Hsu, Aldo Schwartw, Jess Grimes, Bingyu Jiang, Rachel Liu, Elias Hernández, Valentine Salomone, Rebecca Chhay, Isabelle Smith, Sally Hinckley, Nia McClinton, Gabby Morie, Chaya Borison, Torres Li, Arshia Yousefian, El Gomez, Amy Fang, Jack Feder, Michelle Pham, Isabelle Von Lockner, Iris Gur, Jesus Arriola, Divya Narayan
About the Project
Commissioned by CAP UCLA to commemorate the UCLA Centennial in collaboration with the Student Committee for the Arts, Memento Vivere is a project that reimagines the form a contemporary public artwork might take in a contemporary world. In December of 2019, sixty UCLA students participated in an improvisational video shoot on the campus. All were asked to perform a physical gesture that was related to their own relationship to time. These short videos are assembled as the minute hand on a digital clock, positioning these sixty students as literal time keepers of the future.
The clock was originally conceived as a large-scale projection for Royce Hall to be on display throughout the graduation ceremonies of 2020. As the project evolved, the world changed with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the words of the artist Chris Doyle, “At that point, whatever our own personal sense of time might have been, we all have had to acknowledge that it, along with everything else in our world, has changed radically. The clock was adapted to become a living memento.”
“The students who participated in the project were generous and exuberant collaborators and contributed to this snapshot of a profound moment of cultural and economic upheaval and for that I am deeply grateful. I hope that when you look at this piece, whatever the platform where you may view it, the students who made it will help you to remember that movement is possible in every moment.”
Memento Vivere can be downloaded for free from the app store for iWatch, iPad or iPhone at: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/memento-vivere/id1513252586 where it keeps time in the digital world.
The hour-long video loop can be viewed in its entirety at CAP UCLA’s YouTube channels https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaCUHmaIXaM
About CAP UCLA
the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA is UCLA’s public arts unit for the presentation and scholarship associated with performing arts. The Hammer Museum and the Fowler Museum along with the UCLA Film & Television Archive are their colleague organizations within UCLA. Collectively they serve both the campus community and the greater public through respective missions and ongoing programming. Center for the Art of Performance is organized within the School of Art & Architecture, and is located in Royce Hall.
About the Artist
In his animation-based practice, Chris Doyle explores aspiration and progress, questioning the foundation of a culture consumed by striving. His narratives feature a world of increasing speed and complexity in which environmental disaster and social inequities continue to generate anxiety of a looming apocalypse. (more)
