mind as computer, brain as data
2026 · subject, editor, visual artist
I began with multiple sequences of MRI and CT scans of my own brain, each capturing a different layer of tissue, signal, and structure. Looking at the images inspired the feeling that whatever I am, whatever memory and consciousness and selfhood amount to, they apparently live here, in this specific geometry. That this could be exported as a file.
That experience became the material. Working in TouchDesigner, I built a visual system driven by my own scan data. The axial and coronal slices are arranged into 3d point clouds and volumetric formations. The anatomy is still legible: you can find the sulci, the skull base, the grey and white matter, the bilateral symmetry of a brain that belongs to someone. But tiled and colored and set in motion, it becomes something else. A mandala. A machine. A memory of a self.
The system runs in real time, reacting to I Exist Inside This Machine by Max Cooper. It’s a piece of music that never quite resolves whether it’s organic trying to sound synthetic, or synthetic trying to sound organic, and never quite succeeds at either. The visuals flicker with that ambivalence: precise and alien and somehow warm, structured around data that is, technically, me.
Memory Machine is a starting point, not a conclusion. It asks whether consciousness is something the brain stores, the way a hard drive stores files, or whether that framing already misses something essential. It doesn’t answer. It just holds the question open, in light, in real time, for as long as the music lasts.
