In the immersive experimental fiction Image Technology Echoes by Lauren Moffatt, we enter a quiet gallery inside a cavernous museum space.
The gallery is empty, except for an older man and a younger woman. The pair are having a stilted conversation about the painting they are looking at: a large expressionist canvas depicting a stormy ocean. This odd exchange seems to circulate indefinitely… unless we step inside the body of one of the two figures and are transported to their mental space. Each interior is a messy room with its own life. In this place, the person’s doppelgänger homunculus is reciting their stream of consciousness that Moffatt generated with a neural network, and the painting appears very different from what we just saw in the gallery.
