in this world nothing is coming back

About

An introspective VR walking simulator that explores the sensation of post-surgical memory loss through the lens of “machine forgetting.” Navigating a non-Euclidean labyrinth of impossible portals, the player moves through surreal, decaying environments textured by custom next-frame-prediction models (pix2pixHD) trained on my personal video archives.

Shortlisted for FIVARS 2024 (Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories), showcased in Canada in Nov 2024.

Training “Machine Forgetting”

Because the model only predicts the next frame based on patterns, my original memories are fundamentally destroyed in the dataset. The resulting images are uncanny and unstable; the machine's process of data degradation mirrors the human labor of forgetting, and the absent presence of the memory lingers as traces in what remains.

Level Design: constructing broken memory space via Non-Euclidean architecture

spaces you can't return to. Rooms loop back into themselves, and spaces you walk into can never be returned to. Because VR rendering makes these portal transitions visually seamless, the medium itself does the conceptual work: your body believes the impossible geometry before your mind catches up. The architecture physically simulates the grief of memory loss — the harder you try to retrace your steps, the further you get from where you started.