Prosthetic Memory: Final — Mechanical Eye
Prosthetics are, by definition an attempt to gain and an attempt to replace. In terms of the synthetic digital realm, prosthesis is a necessary facet of the virtual landscape, but also the realities of how we engage the world around us. This relationship is understood through tools, the very hallmark of our notion of being in the terms we have named ourselves. However, as our tools evolve, so do the processes through which we entangle those tools within our understanding of ourselves, so do the spaces within which we constitute our realities, and so does the intricate dynamic between the self and the real that we understand as perception, memory, and the generation of meaning. It is in these terms that the project manifests itself as a prosthetic aligning with the layers of memory that helps to constitute that dynamic and assemble our understanding of the real, offering not a direct replacement of the physical real, but something beyond the biological processes through which we have narrowly defined the finitude of our own realities. It is offering a Prosthetic Memory.
Rudolph Hall is known by many as a place of significance for many that have come through the various programs at YSoA. Within its complexities are many moments that often evade our awareness of them, but those which go acknowledged remain a part of the knowable real. Among these moments is the interrelation of spaces to one another and space to New Haven via the mechanism of the window, which establishes a specific mode of engagement within which the place reveals its internal intricacies. Furthering this moment of clarity within the site, this project creates an reassembled stitching of moments as embodiments our curation of perception through the various technological lenses available to us. In this way, the memory of Rudolph Hall become increasingly supplanted by remnants of prosthetic vision that have become readily accepted as the cognitive latency through engagement with the tools. In this way, the memory is slowly transferred from a foreign amalgam to something uncannily familiar, something real.
In more specific terms, the spaces of visual significance in Rudolph Hall were captured through digital and photographic methods. Through these methods, the starting point of the project engages with the mechanism of the mirror through familiar terms, the terms widely accepted by architecture and our heavily visual culture. Pushing these methods onto one another, the project gained its primary engagement with the memory of the space as captured and later brought together through more emergent tools, like photogrammetry and 3D modeling software. In this way, it began to push beyond standard conventional ideas of space and deal more with industry specific tools of space making that are widely accepted as the unknown workings that make up the knowable of physical society to date.
Following this, was an insertion into Unity and ultimately an immersive 3D environment through the Oculus Quest 2 headset as a method of engaging a newly formed digital space in the real, which is much more contemporary and widely accepted, but not readily accepted as an aspect of what most would consider real or involved in the making of ‘real.’ Engagement within this space is essential for the production of the cognitive prosthetic as it manifests here in a tangible experiential form. However, its status here lacks specific sense of realness that will had to be finetuned.
To bring in further understandings of the space as remembered, or captured, there needed to be extensive work regard the nuanced facets of the space that were not yet manifested. The approach to these missing facets was to re-examine the mechanism of the window in terms of the gaze and its operative value within the understanding of the importance of the dialogue between what lies beyond and what lies before the frame, wherein the frame acts as a threshold. In this relationship, there is an obvious need to work with the material of the gaze beyond in a way that uncovers specific assemblages of the multiplicities of views caused by the dynamicity of the eye and a need to capture specific properties of the space that can be destabilized to create an arresting sense of the sublime that directs the user further towards a hijacking of their own gaze as a method of engagement. In terms of what lies before the frame, I focused primarily on an overlaying of the sounds of all of the windows in varying intensities in order reorient users to the highly reconfigured spatial footprint of the prosthetic. In terms of what lies beyond, I utilized RunwayML to produce a series of StyleGANS, depth maps, style transfers, and other experiments until the final model was produced and exported into the space as a Latent Space Walk that became the new subject of the users’ gaze.
Ultimately, the was still a large degree of isolation within the environment that was highly indicative of this prosthetic memory as a space for individual/subjective engagement and one of reflection on the isolated nature of engagement with the formation of memories during the current circumstances. However, I think there is a potential for future work to involve more heavily in a way to push the idea of community or engagement with others through markers within the site that carve out a trace of occupation. This trace then, would involve a confounding of memory in the sense that it would no longer be understood as a linear function or infallible state of consciousness, as these traces could be understood as current consensus, past inhabitants, presence of others, or even one’s own engagement long forgotten. Furthermore, the confounding of space and time within this environment is heavily related to the nature of cognition, especially in terms of the proprioceptive feedback loops that constitute our understanding of environments. In these terms, the project further destabilizes the relationship in order to further create a confounding of the real as a result of one’s movements between spaces. In the process of insertion to the digital real, we disassociate from the physical real and acknowledge our own realness in terms of this new digital body. When we double this same process within the game environment, we create a more readily accepted real in terms of the main scene that has to be departed from and returned to. This grounding ultimately, create the momentary illusion of realness with regards to a hierarchy, where in, the primary digital real becomes higher fidelity throughout its occupation and becomes a more meaningful space of attachment. Ultimately, this process would need to be expounded upon, but the constant reorientation could be the key to full prosthesis.
