CA²RE..... about Trajectories

Inspired by John Wood’s Metadesign frameworks – the Creative Quartet and Tetrahedron, we conceive this memory-induced fabric as a navigable space shaped by a four-dimensional constraint we refer to as the Cognitive Dimensional Correspondence Principle (CDCP). This infers a working cognitive limit of three spatial and one temporal dimension as being evolutionarily wired into human perception and memory, necessitating an approach that manages multi-dimensional realities by collapsing them into the four comprehensible to us, akin to dimensional reduction in machine learning. Latent Reality thus provides a ‘cosmic’ coordinate system structurally aligned with the CDCP. In practice, we engage this through the Synesyn Framework, a suite of ‘Strange Tools’ (à la Alva Noë) we developed to position art as epistemological instrument. Composed of four modules – Metapunkt (orchestration), Syntree (semantic reasoning), Synpunkt (image generation and visual processing), and Synaxes (pattern mapping and synthesis) - it creates a "Creative Quartet" of human-machine collaboration, transforming the researcher from passive user to active agent enacting Vilém Flusser’s call to ‘play with the apparatus’; orchestrating a synthesis of human abductive reasoning with AI’s Bayesian probability into an ‘Inference Architecture’ that deploys four ‘Cosmic Instruments’ as active methods: Dimensional Shifting (role play), Reality Bending (hypothetical framings), Gravitational Drift (iterative refinement), and Quantum Reasoning (abductive hypotheses). These enable the traversing of the latent space to shift the ‘Window of Overton’- the aperture of permissible ideas – revealing hidden constellations of meaning. 

The core trajectory is Forward Remembrance: a bi-directional act simultaneously "remembering forward" into speculative futures while "reflecting backward" to archetypal patterns encoded in data. By mapping Latent Reality, we reveal the AI not as oracle but as mirror, refracting collective myths and thus confronting us with the shifting architecture of human memory as the fundamental substrate to human consciousness. Navigating Latent Reality: A Reflection on my Research Trajectory. Finding traditional critical frameworks that impose a dichotomy between modernist universalism and postmodernist relativism inadequate for navigating complexity, I arrived through a metamodern framing of my Forward Remembrance project at the notion of protopia as coined by Kevin Kelly – also referred to as Micro-Utopia by John Wood. This paradigm favours the discovery of incremental and emergent, immanent transformations rooted in existing possibilities rather than grand prescriptive visions of the future. In my own languaging process, I refer to the substance of this paradigm as Latent Utopias, qualifying the impossible notion of ‘stasis in perfection’ that ‘Utopia’ suggests, with the evolving immanent potentiality suggested by the word ‘latent’. When utopia is seen as latent, it stops being an idyllic yet impossible dream of a state of perfection, and transforms instead into a plausible future. The coinage of the expression ‘Latent Reality’ therefore attempts to provide a means of treating this field of possibility as a territory that can be mapped and analysed for insight. This recursive relationship means AI not only reflects but influences the evolution of human civilisation, oscillating between utopian, dystopian and many other trajectories. Forward Remembrance engages this by scaffolding a methodology around the concept of Latent Reality; foregrounding latent utopias against the palpable backdrop of patterns learnt from the past. Latent Reality is an abstract dimensional space where ideas and patterns mined from reality are encoded and made navigable. The mapping of Latent Reality is not merely technical but ontological and experiential. It is the charting of a "cosmic coordinate system" where the fluid interplay of data, computation, and perception allows us to traverse the liminal space between encoded possibility and embodied experience, ultimately revealing AI as a mirror that reflects the shifting architecture of our own memory and desire. My artistic research practice proceeds along two pathways to map this territory. The first, through creative technology, prototypes a suite of tools (named Synesyn) for experiencing and experimenting with Latent Reality. The second utilises an Applied World Building approach that takes speculation and design fiction as prime methodology, working with, contending with and pondering with the cognitive tools that today’s age of Generative AI makes available. The Forward Remembrance PhD artistic research project therefore converges on a praxis that can be elaborated under the banner of Metafuturism – a protopian manifestation of futurism that is anchored in Applied World Building. My arrival at this nexus has been steered through a ‘thinking through languaging’ process that has led me to Metadesign as a design paradigm for protopian visions and Metamodernism as an oscillating operating system for navigating complexity through plural perspectives, to a meeting point which I now call Metapunkt. This emerging practice which builds on my previous trajectories in the arts, design, architecture and creative technology finds validation in pioneering efforts such as Mona Nasser’s MetaFuturism Lab and completes the research circle that my Forward Remembrance artistic research project has traversed, while indicating the trajectory to follow, into the future.