Meta Memory

VR installation, 2025
Tools: Unreal Engine 5, Blender, Deepseek

Meta Memory is a digital installation which aims to expose the grim underbelly of digital platforms and their excessive computational consumption. Throughout the piece, Meta Memory provides a representation of what digital spaces may look like if we as a society continue to hoard digital waste.

The piece draws on feelings of nostalgia and childhood, whilst integrating publicly available 3D scans as real life artefacts of digital waste. On interaction with each 3D scan, they attempt to reason with the viewer for their continued existence, in the form of a generated poem via the Deepseek API.

Our research explored the medium of game engines and their potential to inform and provoke opinions around the topic of digital waste. Unreal Engine allowed for the creation of stunningly realistic scenery, which when paired with the surrealism of large, animated objects, attempts to create a sense of unease and discomfort. The piece will be further extended with functionality to collect objects, which in turn affect the viewer’s experience. The viewer’s perspective will begin to degrade, with visuals and audio becoming glitchy as they embody the effects of draining computational resources.

Heather Bell

Info

projects❶ meta memory ❷ murmurations in space ❸ not just a sculpture (v2) ❹ the grass isn’t greener ❺ there’s a climate crisis, what does it rhyme with? ❻ not just a sculpture (v1)