Philipp Hesselberger is an artist who is reflecting on the construction and alteration of memory and the shaping of personal and cultural ego through altered recollection.
His work is aiming to create situations of dissociation, stripping viewers of their societal norms, rooting them in the present by triggering disorientation and cutting through via the use of intimate desires, repeating, altering, and constructing echoes of the subconscious.
Website and links: https://www.instagram.com/scrappypipboy/
Project:
Mirror Stage
Intrusive thoughts, unexpected images emerging from noise, shifting glimpses to either be forgotten soon or live on as ever-changing repetition, echoing from the deep in an uncertain rhythm. We seem to have no control over our subconscious, this constant groundwork driving our psyche. It reveals itself in an instance, only to drift from our attention in the next.
It appears to be in full force when one is resting. During sleep we our receptors are overloaded with stimuli; visual, sonic, rapidly altering, anchor points transforming, meaning changing, causing profound emotional impact.
Yet, waking up we seem to be doomed to forget what we experienced in a few glances, impression by impression only to be left with overwhelming emotion and nothing to pin it towards.
It’s hard to grasp, let alone to understand what is happening within the deepest layers of our psyche, our narration seems to be unreliable.
What now, if we would externalise this orchestra of chaos, mirror our subconscious onto another synaptic structure, train a neural network to learn the patterns of our dreams, learn it to dream.
What would we look at if we could experience a direct translation and representation of our core?
How would an externalised subconscious dream, create and alter memories, how would it forget?
What would it do to an individual, being exposed and able to observe this mechanics unfold?
Would it alter their own recollection, would it haunt their dreams, would they remember something they never directly witnessed themself?
Would this interaction with a mechanic subliminal create a feedback loop of altering identity?