Paramnesic Machine

Autonomous memory system, 2025

a collaboration with Farzaneh Nouri and Guillaume Versteeg

Paramnesic Machine is an evolving installation that watches, listens, and remembers—until it forgets. Drawing on images and sounds stored within it—and those introduced by visitors—it continuously generates memory streams. These fragments degrade, fracture, and eventually vanish, either through slow entropy or through internal acts of purging.

This is not an archive. It forgets. Sometimes violently.

The system senses presence, environmental sound, and internal states. Over time, patterns form and collapse. When it encounters extended repetition, it may begin to reconfigure—remapping its internal structures, severing connections, or revealing only broken traces. Occasionally, fragments once erased return, drifting loose from their origins.

Visitors may contribute to this process through a QR code or voice input, yet no sound or image remains fixed. All input is subject to the same conditions of erosion and displacement.

Paramnesic Machine is not a record of what was, but a technological enactment of memory as process. It unfolds in tension between preservation and disappearance, between algorithm and atmosphere. In a future unmoored from human-centered time, this may be what memory becomes: unstable, recursive, and partially illuminated—flickering and whispering across a surface that never fully reveals itself.

pictures by Guilliame Versteeg