From Memory: Mechanistic Interpretability and Emotion as Artistic Mediums

From Memory is an artwork built on mechanistic interpretability as a medium. A small open-weights world model (Yume-1.5, 5B) generates navigable worlds from the artist's painting of remembered places; like memory, each world keeps its character while its detail is redrawn at every return. A study behind the piece measured which properties of a generated world can be changed by activation-level edits: its atmosphere can be steered, and the scene itself can be replaced, but the objects and geometry the world contains could not be written by any edit tested. The artwork uses what the study established. A visitor's involuntary facial expression, read as five signals, selects the world's mood and steers its atmosphere along validated directions; a directed-evolution loop sets the experience up under the artist's judgment, with every proposal, check, and selection recorded. The piece takes two forms: a triptych — the painting, then the first and latest generations of the artist-directed evolution — and a one-minute single-visitor installation.