Memory Palace

For this project, we will build a collective, navigable artwork in Unity. Each student will receive a room in a shared architectural structure and transform it into a space exploring memory. Together, our rooms will form a Memory Palace.

A memory palace is a technique for remembering through spatial association. You place images or ideas at distinct locations along an imagined route, then mentally revisit those locations to recall them. Strange, exaggerated, or unexpected images can make those associations especially memorable.

We will use this principle as an artistic framework. Moving an object out of its familiar context, placing it beside something unexpected, changing its scale, or giving it an unfamiliar surface can alter both its meaning and its memorability. Your room will explore these possibilities through spatial arrangement, objects, photographic textures, video, sound, and interaction.

Your interpretation of memory can be personal, collective, inherited, imagined, or uncertain. You might begin with a familiar place, an everyday routine, a significant object, a sensory association, or a story you have heard. You do not need to disclose private or traumatic experiences.

The central constraint

Everything you introduce into your room must originate in the physical world.

Create your material through photographs, video recordings, sound recordings, 3D scanning, and physical work that you digitize. You may build geometry in Blender or Unity, but your objects must draw on direct observation or your own captured references, and their visible surfaces must use imagery you capture or physically create.

Do not use downloaded models, stock textures, stock footage or music, ready-made decorative prefabs, or generative AI assets. The supplied room, player controls, lighting tools, and shared interaction components are the infrastructure you will use to assemble the artwork.

This constraint does not require realism. You can crop, distort, repeat, recolor, combine, and rearrange your sources. A photographs could become walls, videos can loop across an object, and a broken scanned object could become a giant monument.

Translation as an artistic process

What happens when something moves from the physical world into a digital space?

A photograph flattens depth. A scan misses surfaces or produces strange fragments. A video repeats a moment that has already passed. A recorded sound becomes separated from its source. These transformations can suggest the ways experience becomes memory, imagination, or a dream.

Consider what your room preserves, omits, exaggerates, or changes. Technical imperfections may become artistic material when you use them deliberately.

Your room

You will begin with a shared room prefab. Preserve its entrance, connection points, and a clear route for visitors. Within those boundaries, develop a distinct spatial and sensory experience.

Your room must include:

• Three to five memory anchors: objects, images, sounds, or spatial features that establish meaningful associations.

• Original photographic textures or surface imagery.

• At least one original video used on a surface or object.

• At least one scanned object or an object modeled from direct observation.

• Original recorded sound, with captions or a transcript where needed.

• A deliberate recontextualization: an unexpected juxtaposition, displacement, repetition, change of scale, or relationship between media.

Think about the visitor’s experience. What draws their attention? What do they encounter first? What changes as they approach, look, listen, or act? How does the arrangement of your room contribute to its meaning?

Keep the scope manageable. A few carefully developed elements can create a compelling room. Elaborate game mechanics and complex programming are not required.

Week 1 — Concept and capture

Discuss Critical Play, examine artist examples, project introduction. Experiment with translating a physical object through photography and 3D scanning. Develop possible memory anchors through sketches and unexpected associations.

Install Blender and Unity to your machine.

Install Scanniverse (iOS or android)or Polycam (iOS or android) to your phone

Week 2 — Blender and asset preparation

Learn to import and clean a scan, remove unwanted geometry, check scale, work with photographic textures, and export an asset for Unity. Begin modeling simple forms from observation where useful.

Week 3 — Unity and spatial assembly

Work with the supplied room prefab. Import and arrange your assets, apply materials, place video on a surface, introduce sound, and configure a simple interaction. Test the room from the visitor’s viewpoint.

Week 4 — Complete draft and collective integration

Bring all required elements into your room. Exchange feedback, refine relationships between media, and test your room within the shared palace. Address navigation, playback, performance, and transitions between rooms.

Submit: a complete room package with its dependencies, source log, captions or transcripts, and a draft artist statement.

Week 5 — Assembly and presentation

Revise the work in response to critique and collective testing. Complete documentation and verify your room in the final artwork.

Documentation and evaluation

Keep a source log identifying what you captured, where it came from, how you captured it, and how you transformed it. Obtain permission when recording other people or using private material.

We will evaluate the relationship between your concept and spatial decisions; your use of image, object, video, and sound; your experimentation and revision; and your care in preparing a functioning contribution to the collective artwork.

Technical limits and export settings will be established through our shared tests. The aim is an expressive, coherent room that works as part of a larger artwork.