Shape of Memories

02/02/2024

Installation view. "Objects of Common Interest: Hard, Soft, and All Lit Up with Nowhere to Go", Noguchi Museum, New York.

Exploring the dynamic interaction between opposing elements (such as roughness and smoothness, darkness and lightness, heaviness and lightness, organic and artificial), while maintaining a harmonious balance that creates a surreal environment with characteristics of both ancient and contemporary times.

11/28/2022

"Brain-Universe Relation- combining neuroscience and cosmology through art in metaphorming neural and stellar systems...I intend to float above this field by metaphorically pointing out certain similarities in the dynamics of brains and stars..."
Todd Siler

11/11/2022

When we experience something its shape is like a fingerprint that reflects its unique meaning and how we remember that experience is yet another shape. This goes on....

Working towards finding this research applicable in the visual arts, language and sound art.

11/10/2022

11/06/2022

Can we see memories? Can human memories be visually manipulated or reconstructed or even distorted? Can we track geometric shapes in our memory? Can these principles be applied to other disciplines?

11/04/2022

After a hiatus we are back with a new perspective on the Shape of Memories.

When you experience something, its shape is like a fingerprint that reflects its unique meaning, and how you remember or conceptualize that experience can be turned into another shape. We can think of our memories like distorted versions of our original experiences.

Episodic memory refers to the conscious recollection of a personal experience that contains information on what has happened and also where and when it happened. Recollection from episodic memory also implies a kind of first-person subjectivity that has been termed autonoetic consciousness. Episodic memory is extremely sensitive to cerebral aging and neurodegenerative diseases. In Alzheimer’s disease deficits in episodic memory function are among the first cognitive symptoms observed. Furthermore, impaired episodic memory function is also observed in a variety of other neuropsychiatric diseases including dissociative disorders, schizophrenia, and Parkinson disease. Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to induce and measure episodic memories in the laboratory and it is even more difficult to measure it in clinical populations. Presently, the tests used to assess episodic memory function do not comply with even down-sized definitions of episodic-like memory as a memory for what happened, where, and when. They also require sophisticated verbal competences and are difficult to apply to patient populations. In this review, we will summarize the progress made in defining behavioral criteria of episodic-like memory in animals (and humans) as well as the perspectives in developing novel tests of human episodic memory which can also account for phenomenological aspects of episodic memory such as autonoetic awareness. We will also define basic behavioral, procedural, and phenomenological criteria which might be helpful for the development of a valid and reliable clinical test of human episodic memory.
The physical manifestation of memory, or engram, consists of clusters of brain cells active when a specific memory was formed. Our brain’s hippocampus plays an important role in storing and retrieving these memories.

We are sifting through these patterns and distortions through the works of artists and scientists at the present moment.

04/07/2022

The concept of form is one of the most exciting notions that human consciousness has developed and manipulated. We sometimes think, memory is like water. It flows. It is liquid. And we create channels to divert it.
But in this project we explore, how memory can be seen and felt via shapes.

03/09/2022

At any given time, our five senses are being circuited with a vast amount of information from the environment. As these get stored, they have a profound influence on how our semantic memory is structured.

From a constructivist point of view, memory and thought are deeply entwined. Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience, the director of the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, says: "A specific memory is stored in a specific pattern of connectivity between engram cell ensembles that lie along an anatomical pathway." The researchers also found that though memories held by silent engrams cannot be naturally recalled, the memories persist for at least a week and can be “awakened” days later by treating cells with a protein that stimulates synapse formation.

How do we visualize the relative interrelationship between thought and memory?

Cognitive scientist Michael Leyton says every feature of the world is a memory store. A scar on a person's face, a dent in the car door, a scratch on a piece of furniture-give us an idea that memory stores can take a variety of forms. For instance: scars, dents, growths, cracks etc tell us that memory can be stored in symmetries as well as asymmetries.
We will, in our book, follow how many scientists, artists, visualizers, scholars visualize these variable forms of memory.