Angelo Mao

Mashed Memories

Artwork 1 Details :

This work speculated how personal feelings and memories would be experienced in the metaverse. Mashed Memories is a part of Angelo Mao's long-term project to archive old brutalist buildings in Childhood memory using 3D modelling. This artwork intensionally combines the childhood memory of living inside a neighbourhood with this kind of building and cyberpunk cliches to explore how memory can be perceived as a mixture of things. We can now relive the memory by virtually recreating the scene, and we often find memory is beautified and enhanced with things that were not there. This old brutalist building is the legacy of China's bygone planned economy period, served as many Chinese's Childhood home and became a part of Chinese culture and memory. While these buildings are now mostly depleted and abandoned, Angelo Mao decided to archive this memory and simulate it in a virtual realm. This work simultaneously reminisces the past and speculates the future by embracing that everything can be experienced digitally. Metaverse's value lies in everything that can be perceived as a virtual asset, in which it is crucial to understand how memories and identity could interplay in this novel technology.