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Created during an eight-week residency within the Library’s SLV LAB, In Memory | Of Being is built from ‘orphan’ materials in State Library Victoria's vast digitised collection: photographs of unidentified subjects, recordings whose significance has been lost to time. Artist-scientist Yoyo Munk shares how they created this work for the Library’s Domed La Trobe Reading Room, blending the Library’s architecture and archives in a haunting exploration of memory and place.
Learn more about In Memory | Of Being
Experience Yoyo Munk's mixed reality installation for yourself
Sat 8, 15 & 22 November 2025
Standalone viewings during the day
10.30am – 4.45pm
State Library Victoria
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Fri 14 November 2025
Late night viewings with a bar and lounge and FREE access to the Creative Acts exhibition
7–10.15pm
State Library Victoria
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Video transcript
I'm Yoyo Munk. I am a scientist and artist. I am very delighted to be the inaugural Creative Technologist-in-Residence as part of the SLV LAB. And for the last seven weeks or so, I've been working on In Memory | Of Being, a bespoke mixed reality installation piece in the Level 5 gallery of the Dome.
I came at this project wanting to honour the idea of it being a creative technologist-in-residence, but also have it be an art project as well. What makes residencies so great is that just like, a) I got to spend time within collections on the backside of the library with folks who are actively engaged and doing that collections work, as well as people who have a deep knowledge of the library space and have inhabited this space through its changing nature over time.
Most libraries maintain a physical collection and they also maintain access to a digitised collection. And so, the early idea was that it would feel different to explore the digitised collection of the library if it existed in a spatial context, in a library, much like the way the physical collection does.
I focused on photographs, oral histories, elements of the digitised collection where the subject is unknown. We don't know who this person is or where this photograph was taken. A lot of it is portraits. So there's a huge collection of portrait photography from the early days of Victoria. There are many, many glass negatives and silver gelatin emulsion photographs where there's been quite beautiful damage to the materials just as a result of their fragility.
All of the items that exist within this installation work are inherently the use of technology to try and reach for a sense of permanence. You know, early portrait photography... this might be the one portrait that you ever got. That's a desire to capture something permanent about yourself.
I do like the fact that we're operating inside the Level 5 gallery. I find there's something just poignant about just getting to just wander through these fields of unidentified portraits, looking at things like the similarities between how people posed for portraits at the time and kinds of images that people take of themselves now. I hope that people come away from this with a sense of emotional connection to the idea of a library's memory, and I hope that they get something of out of getting to see the collection of the library in a different way than they've seen it before.