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IN RECOVERY; (2013) Alex Hovet; Super 8; TRT: 2.55
In Recovery challenges my father’s memory with my own.
This film is constructed from scanned prints of family photographs which I subjected to a randomized glitching process using a program called GoldMosh. The photographs become warped and are degraded as their code is broken down, creating this sporadic digital collage. These documented memories being digitized and degraded by a process over which I have little control echo the physical breakdown of memories after uncontrollable neurological trauma.
My father suffers from short-term memory loss and difficulties as the result of a near-fatal stroke in 2006, when I was 13 years old. In 2013, I began a cycle of films that explore the degradation of image and memory and the physical processes of recovery. This was the first film I made in the series, and it challenges my father’s memory with my own. Our memories are at a crossroads, in which he remembers what I cannot from the beginning of my life, but I can process most of what he cannot in his daily life now. These conflicting experiences compete with standardized medical facts and my own personal recollections of the stroke event. In degrading images from my childhood, which are documented experiences that I cannot remember, I reconcile the fact that my father can still remember them, despite trouble recalling many of his own today. Other pieces in the series explore aspects of creating narrative from anonymous imagery and the recreation of memory from family archives.
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