‘At bottom, the spectre is the future, it is always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come or come back.’ (Derrida, 1994)
in this world nothing is coming back, inspired by Derrida's hauntology, is a VR walking simulator into a surreal dreamscape of fragmented memories and morphing realities mediated by machine learning generated moving images and non-euclidean, impossible spaces achieved through the use of portals. Beginning as a reconstruction of the artist's childhood home, a labyrinthine reflection of her post-surgical memory loss, the journey expands beyond personal recollection to confront a lost future, incorporating elements such as a recreated future-telling ritual from the artist's cultural background, exploring broader anxieties surrounding economic crises, war, and the precariousness of love in a rapidly changing world.
The experience oscillates between the haunting presence of the past, the unreliability of memory, and the unsettling uncertainty of the future. While blurring these contingencies into a blender of regrets marked indelibly by personal history, slowly tasting words that are swallowed back, memories eaten by mould, and the bitterness of growing up, like the fragmented visions and thoughts that flicker and fade as one drifts to sleep.
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The piece can be understood from many different angles.
On the level of the Machine Leaning generated moving images, there is an inherent tension between my intention to engage with lost memories and the machine’s cold inductive logic that seeks to calculate loss. Nfp-generated videos, with their fluid, morphing quality, mirrored the way memory itself distorts and reshapes the past. Through nfp, the quality of the original image declined, frequently end up being stuck in a loop-like pattern that recursively generates itself, they became slices of ‘stills’, like haunting echoes of experiences, blurring the lines between the real and the unreal, capturing the yearning for what can never be fully reclaimed, yet these ‘unrealities’ remains just as powerful as the impacts of ‘reality’. This, I argue, is what makes nfp-generated video inherently hauntological, as it exists in the liminal space between these two. It is also a clash between a rather romantic nostalgia and through an algorithmic way of looking back to the past. Although the generated visuals are warped and out of shape, the epistemology implied in such moving images nonetheless resembles my epistemology towards memories. My memories are no less scattered and fragmented just like the fragmented data in the machine learning latent space. This is why the use of next-frame-prediction is suitable for my approach towards memory. It tries to predict the next frame by holding onto fragmented impressions of the past.
On the level of game design, this work is an articulation of memories in space. Although it was an intuitive decision to exhibit my generated videos in a VR simulator, the actual design of such a space forced me to consider how memories can be associated in a more ambiguous yet poetic manner. My design can almost be seen as a curatorial one, in which abstract associations between works were drawn and implied in their whereabouts. This explains the almost Lynchian aesthetics in my work, where love and destruction is one and the same under the cold gaze of the machine.
In my description of the work I used a quote from Derrida’s Spectres of Marx: At bottom, the spectre is the future, it is always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come or come back.
His conceptualisation of memory encourages a reflexive way of seeing one’s own memory. The labour of memorising goes hand in hand with the labour of forgetting and the gap created by these two seemingly incompatible actions is where “ghosts” reside. This gap is the uncanny, the deja vu, where things can feel both homely and unfamiliar. My images are uncanny due to the algorithmic way of predicting the next frame, during which my nostalgic intention means nothing but a pattern in the dataset under the cold, bleak gaze of the machine. By outsourcing the labour of forgetting and memorising to the machine, I reflect on my own memory, inviting viewers to witness how the machine destructs my images, while the haunting absent presence of my memory still lingers on as traces on the generated works.
