Mnemosyne Theatre (still), 2025.
Immersive 8K video, colour, sound, 10 mins.
Upon wearing the headset of Mnemosyne Theater, one enters a circular virtual stage. Landscapes formed from AI’s disassembly and recombination of nature, cityscapes, bodily tissues, and iris patterns layer like geological strata, becoming a vast revolving screen that slowly turns clockwise. Beneath lies a black, mirror-like virtual surface, where this panoramic flow of data reflects faintly upon the abyss, dissolving into blur, while at the center a colossal iris-lens hovers, projecting the afterimages of the world.
Are we the ones who look, or the ones being seen? As in the Renaissance Theatro della Memoria, built for a solitary mind, the stage and audience seats are inverted: the spectator becomes an immobilized actor, while the rotating screen pours its gaze like an endless audience. Whose memory is this? Like Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, where symbols and images gathered only to scatter, the strata of memory accumulate, yet in the instant they seem to form, they pale and vanish into the depths.
When the narration ends and the headset is removed, the viewer returns—through a subtle silence—into the world-stage as an actor resuming their role. Yet this Theatrum Mundi to which they return is now peopled with AI-generated NPCs (non-player characters). Now the artist asks: “Am I truly myself?”
“Now if the ancient orators, wishing to place from day to day the parts of the speeches which they had to recite, confided them to frail places as frail things, it is right that we, wishing to store up eternally the eternal nature of all things which can be expressed in speech […] should assign them to eternal places”
— CAMILLO, G. L’Idea Del Teatro (1550), quoted in Yates, F. The Art of Memory (1966)
Pimlico. London. 2008 p.142
“There are but two strong conquerers of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture”
— Ruskin, J. The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849)