Synthetic Memory

Synthetic Memory investigates the unstable moment before authenticity is consciously judged: when a synthetic image, voice, or narrative may already feel familiar, credible, or personally meaningful.

Rather than asking only whether synthetic media can be identified as real or fake, the research focuses on plausibility—the way visual, vocal, narrative, and affective cues can align strongly enough for a fabricated fragment to feel like a possible past.

How can a computational artwork stage synthetic fragments in ways that invite recognition-like autobiographical uptake, and how does that experience change once their constructed nature is disclosed?

The research brings together reconstructive memory, synthetic-media credibility, plausibility, and Computational Arts.

I use the term synthetic memory not to describe the permanent implantation of a false memory, but a temporary and revisable form of autobiographical uptake: a condition in which a constructed fragment feels sufficiently close to one’s own past to become experientially meaningful.

The installation framework develops this through three operations:

Synthetic media becomes memory-like not simply through technical realism, but through staged plausibility.

The project therefore shifts attention from real versus fake toward the conditions through which artificial media becomes temporarily inhabitable as interpretation.