A Map of Days Past - 120S 250W
Video, 2025
About the artwork
"A Map of Days Past" is a new chapter in the exploration of some themes I keep going back to.
First of all, the unavoidable parallel between the way artificial intelligence reinvents reality and the way our memory does exactly the same, whether it's through hallucinations or dreams (which is why I'd rather define it "artificial memory"). This liminal space between the believable and the implausible makes us skeptical about the machine but it should also make us skeptical about ourselves.
In "A Map of Days Past" this exploration meets the fascination for the night as the liminal place by definition.
The series is imagined as a physical exploration of our memory world, where shreds of places, voices and sounds all blend into a haunting experience.
The series comprises a main piece that leads us on a journey across many of those "places", evoking what could be one story or many stories or no story at all. Maybe one of those dreams that you just can't get out of.
The other pieces in the series are single "places" with their own impossible coordinates in the memory world.
Sound design by Andrea Ciulu
Audio explanation
Listen to Andrea Ciulu discuss this work.
Andrea Ciulu was born in Rome, Italy, in the 1980s. With a background as a writer and visual artist, he has been working in the creative industries for the last twenty years in roles of creative direction.
His artistic work is an ongoing exploration of the limits of memory and of our perception of reality: a research conducted by exploiting technology and its intrinsic limits, by mixing the familiar with the uncanny, nostalgia with bewilderment. Andrea’s work has been exhibited in Rome, San Francisco and Mexico City.