Funes is a sculpture of the character called Funes from Kiral World (Read more ︎︎︎here︎︎︎ about the Kiral World characters.).

That character is named after Jorge Luis Borges’ short story "Funes el memorioso", which centers on a man who gains the ability to remember everything after an accident. Despite dating back from 1942, the story remains relevant today, echoing contemporary transhumanist ambitions of preserving the brain and its memories forever.

On the one hand, this sculpture is infused with a scent symbolizing memory itself. More specifically, the sculpture contains a mineral infused with a scent that reconstructs the smell of the legendary madeleine dipped in a linden infusion, described in a pivotal scene from Swann’s Way, the first volume of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust—a work centered on the theme of involuntary memory.

On the other hand, the sculpture is made of textile printed with real-fake memories generated by a GAN algorithm trained to produce new convincing visual memories of my childhood with the help of a database of visuals from that period of my life. 

With the algorithm filling the gaps of my own forgetfulness and the smell of the madeleine reactivating memories, the sculpture hints at the entanglements between autobiographical memory and its digital doppelgänger: data, remembering and forgetting, imagined realities, and ideals of progress.