ASTER-25 – OBRA 02 Reminiscencia Programada

Programmed Reminiscence is an elegy constructed with tulle, light, and time. Through art, neuroscience, and physics, this piece invites us to face something deeply human: the fragility of identity, while confronting us with a scientific truth: every system tends toward entropy.

The title refers to planned obsolescence, a term that defines our era: everything is designed to fail. We live surrounded by objects that break down just as they stop being useful. But what if our memory, too, had an expiration date embedded from the start?
The installation is composed of a floating network of tulle and LED lights, simulating a neural web that curves like the fabric of space-time. Each point of light suggests a neuron; each fold of the tulle echoes the curves of the human brain. The network flickers, it feels alive. From it, a drop of water falls at regular intervals. There is no urgency, only repetition, just like time, just like forgetting. In Alzheimer’s disease, the hippocampus atrophies, neural connections weaken, and plaques form that block communication. Gradually, our sense of self begins to dissolve.But this loss doesn’t happen suddenly, on the other hand it’s a slow retreat. We first forget names and facts. Then faces, then dates. In the end, only the most primitive memories remain: music, a summer at the beach, the park where you played as a child.

The narrative structure of the self collapses, but something essential remains, as if, by losing everything we’ve learned, we return to what we once were. That is what this work represents: a network that still lives, even if it no longer remembers why; a drop that insists; the oldest memory that persists even when language can no longer name it. This piece does not seek to explain. It offers no comfort. It only asks for presence. It asks us to become aware of that final reminiscence which, programmed or not, reminds us of who we were.