Portraits from the Memory Palace
by Lilyillo
Opening September 13th
ARTIST BIO
Lilyillo, born in 1981 in Sydney, is a multidisciplinary artist based in Canberra, Australia. She works across AI and traditional mediums, exploring personal histories, notions of craftsmanship, and the acts of mark making and unmaking. Her work has been exhibited extensively both across Australia and internationally at venues including Artmatr in Brooklyn, NYC; the Constantin Brancusi Centre of the Craiova Art Museum in Romania; The Canvas 3.0 in New York; Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris; and the Contemporary Art Academy of China in Beijing.
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She has received the Australia Council for the Arts: 'New Work Emerging Artist Grant' and has undertaken artist residencies at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris and at Deveron Arts in Huntly, Scotland. Lilyillo completed a Bachelor of Art History & Theory, a Master of Art Administration & Curatorial Studies, and a Master of Fine Arts, majoring in drawing, at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW, Sydney.
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Portraits from the Memory Palace
This is a collection of 12 portraits of women that I have met along the way, in life, and in walking through the data of the latent space. They were waiting there, in the interior space of the memory palace, embedded in loci, familiar hallucinations.
Working with the medium of AI and the latent space, often feels like a memory illusion. It involves both familiarity and unfamiliarity, something akin to dejavu.
Dejavu was once described to me as though we are experiencing a current time experience, and the present experience falls into the long-term memory immediately, rather than short term memory, so it feels like the present time experience is being recalled from a deep memory space, at the very same time as it is occurring.
Being recalled and embedded at the same time.
Perhaps our brain goes slightly off-track while processing information, it hallucinates and creates. There is a feeling that something presently experienced has already occurred in the past, or is in some data space, already waiting to be found. The illusion pits the familiar experience against the knowledge that this familiarity is inaccurate, a glitch in the data.
The latent space reminds me of the memory palace, also known as the method of loci - a technique of memory enhancement, which uses visualisations of familiar spaces to enhance the contextualisation of information, and enhance recall. It is often the interior of a familiar home that becomes one’s own ‘memory palace’ and we wander through this interior space, placing information we wish to tether to its walls. We commit to memory by forming a connection between the information and the locus. Then retrieval is achieved by 'walking' through the space, allowing memory to be activated via context and association.
I imagine I prompt into this darkened interior dwelling, and small embedded particles are ‘recalled’, diffused and transmitted into form. It is here, in the dusty crevasses deep within the data, these portraits were birthed. Hallucinations from the data become a dejavu of people I once knew, or never knew.
