CTRL+SAVE: 

Navigating Memory, Embodiment, and Digital Preservation

CTRL+SAVE emerged as a critical exploration of how we preserve meaningful experience in an age characterised by digital impermanence. As a collaborative virtual reality (VR) environment developed as a group project for the Collaborative Intermedia Studio module at Trinity College Dublin's MPhil in Digital Arts and Intermedia Practices, the project interrogates the tension between embodied experience and externalised memory dialectic that fundamentally shapes our relationship with technology and our physical bodies.

When we enter virtual spaces, we engage in what might be termed technogenic memory practices. We extend our cognitive capacities through external systems while simultaneously reconfiguring our embodied relationship to space and time. Our memories become distributed across virtual environments, organised not by personal or collective processes but by technical systems that determine what persists and vanishes.

The project's conceptual foundation rests on this tension between retention and erasure. CTRL+SAVE represents our desire to preserve what matters and to explore the complex ways our digital practices are restructuring our relationships with memory, embodiment, and presence. By combining a virtual reality (VR) art gallery with a time capsule, we created a symbolic space for preserving both digital and physical legacies, capturing the essence of our inaugural cohort, our interactions with emerging technologies, and our exploration of how these forces shape the future of memory and art.