Visual essay examines the relationship between preservation and memory, questioning the act of discarding objects.
This visual essay is based on a poster that was presented at the 14th Annual Illustration Research Symposium, Illustration & Heritage: Sharing Histories to Draw Out Futures. At that same event, keynote speaker Dan Hicks discussed Pitt Rivers’s concept of ‘realistic degeneration’ and how visual forms deteriorate over time through repeated copying (). Attending this talk encouraged me to reflect on preservation as an act of remembering. If this is the case, then is throwing an object away an act of forgetting?
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Stephanie Parr (2026) studied this question.
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