“Remembrance: Coral” by Chanee Choi
Remembrance: Coral (2023)
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- Remembrance: Coral
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Remembrance: Coral is a biofeedback gamified performance art project created by the artist to confront the fear of inheriting early-onset Alzheimer’s, from which her mother now suffers. The project utilizes machine learning to create interactive animations, similar to video games, that respond to EEG brain sensor interactions. It combines a surrealistic artistic sensibility with technical expertise and represents a culmination of the artist’s creative concepts.
Remembrance: Coral traces the story of a woman slowly dying of dementia through an aesthetically vibrant world. It was created through the use of motion capture and machine-learning animation. Real hospital records and patient information were transformed into visuals and with the addition of a database of existing poems, novels, and other writings about memory loss, synthesized into poetry by the OpenAI program GPT-2. This forms the basis of the audio track.
EEG input is used in order to provoke questions about oblivion and the extinction of memories. The brainwaves are divided into two categories: concentration and no concentration. While concentration is maintained, the narrative of the video game is forwarded, and progress continues sequentially. However, in the case of no concentration, the action of the video game is stuck, and visual elements disperse like dust. The audio and visual text are computer-generated poems about memory loss created by the AI, GPT-2. The poem is composed of 4 parts that progress continuously while concentration is maintained. When concentration is lost the letters are erased one by one.
