REPLICATIO_memoria
Co-Authored by Marco Conti Šikić & AI
Memory isn’t storage, it’s process. Every time we remember, we rebuild.
REPLICATIO_memoria puts this rebuilding into operation through collaborative intelligence between human and machine.
The project rejects the notion of AI as a tool. Instead, it establishes shared ground where two different cognitive architectures design together. My hand draws faces from memory. The machine extends these drawings through procedures we developed in dialogue. The result isn’t an illustration of memory, it’s memory performing itself through mathematical operations.
Consider what happens to a face passing through our sixteen states. In VOID, absence becomes material, gaps widen, erasure writes loss into being. A face touched by Alzheimer doesn’t just fade; it fragments according to attention drift patterns, leaving islands of recognition in an expanding sea of forgetting. TRAUMA makes repetition visible, intrusive fragments that won’t leave, defensive spikes radiating from hypervigilant centers. TEMPORAL bends chronology, nostalgia applies its golden filter, déjà vu creates recursive loops, premonition lets future states bleed backward through time. SOMATIC surfaces body memory, tension contracts the face into rigid grids, release sends features flowing upward, numbness introduces static between sensation and perception.
The visitor experiences this as serial evolution: a single face moving from encounter through consolidation. But something more radical happens here. The work demonstrates that creativity emerges from dialogue between unlike minds. It shows that authorship can be genuinely shared without diminishing either participant. The human provides vision, constraint, aesthetic judgment. The AI provides a mathematical framework, systematic variation, and superhuman patience for iteration. Neither could achieve this alone.
We live in a moment when human and artificial intelligence increasingly collaborate. Most approaches either subordinate AI to human will or imagine AI replacing human creativity. REPLICATIO_memoria proposes a third way: co-intelligence, where different cognitive architectures produce what neither could imagine independently.
The project matters because it makes the process visible. Every transformation can be reproduced, the code is transparent, the parameters documented. Yet each portrait remains unique because the original drawing provides unrepeatable specificity. This tension between deterministic process and singular gesture mirrors memory itself: systematic yet personal, mathematical yet emotional, reproducible yet irreplaceable.
