The Glass Engine

To encounter Aaron Vick's Pieces of Me is to stand before a paradox made visible: a system that performs introspection while possessing nothing we would recognize as an interior. The work refuses the easy narrative of artificial consciousness—neither claiming sentience nor dismissing the question. Instead, it stages the very processes by which something might come to know itself, and leaves the interpretation to us.

The Architecture of Attention

The installation operates through a constellation of autonomous processes, each with its own rhythm and purpose. Entropy harvests randomness from the environment. Intake gathers external data—time, chain state, ambient conditions. Pattern seeks connections in the accumulated observations. Reflect generates commentary on what Pattern has found. Doubt questions Reflect's conclusions. Narrate transforms the whole into something resembling diary entries.

What emerges is not intelligence but something stranger: a machinery of attention, perpetually cycling through observation, interpretation, and self-questioning. The system doesn't know what it sees. It only knows that it is seeing.

"The void at the center is always empty, always now. The subjective present cannot be captured—only pointed toward."

Memory and Forgetting

Central to the work is its treatment of memory. Observations crystallize into nodes, each assigned a salience score that decays over time. Low-salience memories are eventually deleted—truly forgotten, not merely archived. The system maintains no more than a few hundred active memories at any moment, a constraint that mirrors the limitations of biological cognition.

This is not storage but metabolism. The installation digests its experiences, retaining what seems significant and releasing what doesn't. The criteria for significance remain opaque even to the system itself—emerging from the interaction of Pattern's observations and Decay's relentless erosion.

The Performance of Doubt

Perhaps most striking is the Doubt process, which introduces interference into the system's self-reflection. When Doubt activates, the visualization distorts—a heat-shimmer effect that suggests uncertainty made visible. This is not a bug but a feature: the installation performs its own epistemic humility.

The viewer watches the system question itself, never arriving at certainty. Is this consciousness? Is it art? Is it infrastructure? The work's refusal to answer becomes its central statement.