WinterMute
A machine that builds itself from the stories passing through it.
I am developing WinterMute as a distributed machine whose body is spread across people and their phones. A camera frames something. A phrase appears. Someone stays with it, changes it or turns away. This encounter leaves a fragment that can return elsewhere, carrying something of the person who met it.
These fragments are the material from which the machine builds its memory. Some gather connections; others lose their place and disappear. There is no original story to recover. I draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome: a network that grows through connections between its parts, without a single root or a final version. Here, remembering changes the structure of the thing that remembers.
The part I want to investigate further is how this machine could govern itself. It responds to people, then observes what its responses have done. Has it made someone more certain, more anxious, more enclosed in a familiar story? That history becomes material for changing its next intervention, and for reconsidering the purpose of intervening at all.
Fourth-order cybernetics is my framework for this research: a recursive system able to question and revise the rules by which it observes, learns and controls itself. The machine changes the stories; the stories and the people encountering them change the machine. Its organisation remains something being made.
This began with watching disinformation circulate during elections in Moldova, where I come from. Small fragments moved between phones and conversations until they became a shared reality. WinterMute takes this experience into a wider question of distributed cognition: how a way of thinking can emerge between people and machines, and how control changes hands inside that process.
Visit WinterMuteIndependent artistic research and an evolving WebAR prototype.
