The 'Ritual Camera' Archives Only the Most Forgettable Moments of Our Lives

If you had to go through and classify the events of your own life as "basic boring shit" or "relatively interesting" that would be an easy task. You surely do this already on some level and you also probably don't ever ask whether or not those classifications are accurate or not. Because of course they are—it's your life.

As with many features of human experience, a question this seemingly trivial winds up being an interesting and very non-trivial problem for a computer. If a computer were to be tasked with observing you as you go about your daily business, it may be faced with the question of what matters. How might the engineers behind that computer craft an algorithm to make such a determination?

Or a deeper question: How might they go about taking only the repetitious boring stuff, the seemingly forgettable, and crafting meaningful abstractions from it? That is, how can we take many repetitions of a "boring" event and render it is a single interesting event?

Enter the Ritual Camera, a new prototypical system by interaction design and intelligent systems researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology, and described in the journal IEEE Pervasive Systems, for watching us as we do things we are most likely to forget and remembering them for us.

"Our everyday life seems to be a straightforward thing; however, through its omnipresence, it can be difficult to define," the Eindhoven group writes. "As Rita Felski put it, 'After all, everyday life simply is, indisputably: the essential taken for—granted continuum of mundane activities.' Consequently, the value for remembering ordinary experiences is often underestimated. Experiences seen as ordinary at the time are seen as less ordinary several months later, and people are more curious and interested in remembering them than expected."

It'll probably take a bit of stewing to really see the problem. It mostly reduces down to the underrepresentation of everyday life in digital memory. As we fervently collect novel experiences, we are only selectively remembering. And as cameras and digital memory multiply, the need for selectivity diminishes. Now, for the first time, we can creative archives that are, well, honest. For better or for worse.

The idea behind the Ritual Camera is, as alluded to above, to take many images of the same event over time and then return a single abstraction. This corresponds to a recent idea known as layered memories, in which many occasions are represented or representable as one single story.

The process of generating a suitable abstraction involves several different steps and several possibilities (this is an extreme reduction of those), including highlighting recurring objects and forms, blending and collaging, blurring, etc. The idea is that every method of generating composite images emphasizes some feature of the repetitious event being documented (family dinners, in the group's experiments): what changes, what stays the same, what constitute habits, what people are there, what postures and actions are taken. Each method of abstraction was attempted by the researchers via their Ritual Camera and then presented to the experiment participants.

Some conclusions: "Generally, we gained three insights: the value of visualizations depended on the envisioned use; people valued showing diversity over visualizing the average; and people recognized abstract or 'invisible' notions of their lives in the visuals, such as ambiance and behaviors."

That last insight about observing ambience and I guess what you'd just call vibe is pretty interesting. In chasing after boring memories, the researchers have managed to capture the sense of a scene. Remembering is more than just rewinding a tape, after all—it's a rich, weird thing we're only now just beginning to understand.