Apopheniac

Neuroscience tells us that memories aren’t just written once; but rather, they are reconsolidated each time we remember them. As we tell ourselves our own story, and recall our past, we create critical moments, and opportunities for manipulation, perhaps even erasure.

Apopheniac explores this fluidity in the process of memory, using photographic negatives as raw material. The images are reinterpreted, by physically melting them. The altered and disappearing shapes in the photographic emulsion, blends moments together, re-scripts time and allows, through the flow of chemistry, for new patterns to emerge.

Tough created through a chemical process, the resulting images often inadvertently echo the visual language of artificial intelligence. This unintended convergence might never have been noticed were it not for our ever increasing exposure to machine made visuals. It triggered a reflection on what Jean Baudrillard might have written about our era, as seen through the lens of the “Hyperreal”; where reality and simulation become indistinguishable, eroding the boundaries between the authentic and the fabricated.

Within this realm between chemistry and code, the apopheniac, a pattern obsessed being emerges and attempts to connect all things.

In an often desperate need to ascribe meaning and form a linear timeline of our lives, our narrating selves fuse together seemingly disjoined moments. This need for meaning often blurs the lines between reality and fiction. From the perspective of logic these are inaccuracies, human errors, glitches. Yet, they are a necessary shortcut to navigate both our outer and inner worlds, our subjective realities, our traumas. 

This text was inspired by a conversation with Chat GPT, comparing human false memories to AI hallucinations. The large language model quoted research from a neuroscience paper produced by one of the most reputable neuroscience labs in the world. Neither the research paper nor the author actually exist.

Apopheniac [not a word] > From: Apophenia ap·o·phe·nia | \ ˌa-pə-ˌfē-nē-ə \ The tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas)

Apopheniac is an ongoing series of immersive multi screen video and sound installations, objects and photographs, that explore our relationship with reality.