My crypto-memories: an enigmatic, useless and eternal point of view on life.
Embedding fragments of information in a cryptographic chain is not something new. Actually, it’s one of the biggest hypes around – the concept of the distributed ledger – since BitCoin and until yesterday’s new crypto-app. A perfect playground for digital-art essays, I thought, but blockchain is a serious thing, so not easy to start little private things on top of it… uhm.
With this in mind, I started to kick the ball against the wall. Then memory came to help. What is memory and what’s the deal with crypto-chains? Let’s start from scratch, Wikipedia:
Memory is the faculty of the mind by which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968). Memory is vital to experiences and related to limbic systems, it is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If we could not remember past events, we could not learn or develop language, relationships, nor personal identity (Eysenck, 2012).
So, memory is integral part of what we are and it directly contributes to shape who we are, by influencing our decisions. To a certain extent, memory is the decision itself, in terms of what drives our future actions according to what we remember from the experience of the past.
But while memory represents the value of what remains, memories might be volatile, change and modify, or even disappear completely. Is it still a memory something which have already faded away? What if we could hold some arbitrary (even sporadic) fragments of memory and lock them in an infinite, chronological and personal chain? Sounds interesting, so let’s prototype it.
By taking away mining from the blockchain concept (here mining is redundant, being my own memory ledger strictly personal), the logic requires no more than 50 lines of code and it’s basically described by one single function:
HASH[n] = HASH( HASH[n-1] + { memory[n] } )
To initialize the crypto-chain, let’s take a zero-event made of nothing, no bits at all. In cryptography, even nothing can be represented by more than nothing. Using the SHA512 algorithm in a PHP 5.5.38 environment, here’s he value of nothing:
HASH[0]=SHA512(“”)=cf83e1357eefb8bdf1542850d66d8007d620e4050b5715dc83f4a921d36ce9ce47d0d13c5d85f2b0ff8318d2877eec2f63b931bd47417a81a538327af927da3e
So, at the very moment my first memory will come, this zero-hash will be coupled with the content of the memory and (all together) re-hashed to produce a unique cryptographic and sequence-based representation of the fragment of memory itself:
HASH[1]=SHA512(“cf83e1357eefb8bdf1542850d66d8007d620e4050b5715dc83f4a921d36ce9ce47d0d13c5d85f2b0ff8318d2877eec2f63b931bd47417a81a538327af927da3e”+{memory[1]}”);
In other (hex) words:
de58901a2e57b02b4474d5db88d1c8de8941993d7dedd04b01f5a5d18649017260301e9d72f40c6a9a950dcaf4606baa328bfc9eb7de04d86585cb12e4ac888f
This is the representation of my first fragment of memory, perpetually chained to itself and to the previous one by a cryptographic lock. So what? Who cares?, you could say. And in fact you would be right… this 64-chars string is worth nothing on its own, for at least two reasons:
- it’s not meaningful, so it does not tell anything about the content of the memory it encapsulates;
- it’s not decipherable, so even if you would know the code behind it, you simply couldn’t convert it back unless you invest in an enormous amount of computing power (brute force) and you have a long free time to wait;
Exactly like our memories are for someone else and, sometimes, even for ourselves. And this is the point.
Nobody holds the secret sauce of memory, especially when it comes to understand how it is stored, retrieved and re-combined.
This digital artifact, a simple ledger of obfuscated fragments of memory in a chain, builds an elementary and singular point of view on what happens inside our head. As it happens with such an enigmatic crypto-chain, the fact of holding all the fragments of our stories in a pocket-ready archive might just be an illusion of being able to use it for even the easiest purpose.
In reality, I think that when we retain special moments, we hold a sort of blurred, chemical picture of faces, places, colors, smells and sounds, but we really don’t own memories completely. Sometimes it could even be the exact contrary.
Our memories own us, and this becomes evident when we fall sick and our memory starts to fail.
When we lose the location of our personal chemical ledger, every memory looks like an orphan chunk of life, an apparently meaningless set of symbols like these:
Looking this picture in a decade, will it be what the first kiss to my wife would look like inside my algorithmic-brain? Or will it be just the log of our my last Instagram like? Who knows. But I love the idea of keeping it, forever.
512 is a personal crypto-memory performance, at the intersection of technology and art research. Since 2017 March 21st, a hashing processor in the cloud is automatically fed with sets of my life’s fragments using my mobile phone and IFTTT. At every process, the latest hash is displayed on the home page of the project, while the ledger is transparently updated. This strictly-personal performance is visible only through the hash of my last memory. Do I feel discouraged by the absolute uselessness of this piece? Once again, absolutely not. :-)
Cover picture: derivative work form “Mnemosy ne ” (Oil on canvas, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1875 — 1881)
Riccardo is Beretta’s Digital Business Development Manager. Graduated in Engineering, he has served in various marketing roles before focusing on business transformation and digital platforms since 2016. In the last decade, he has developed a personal interest in exploring the potential of computational privacy/trust towards a more effective and sustainable data driven society. With the aim of contributing to a wide and open conversation about MIT’s OPAL project, he published “The end of Personalinvasion” (2019) and “OPAL and Code-Contract: a model of responsible and efficient data ownership for citizens and business” (2018). He is a member of the advisory board of “Quota 8000 — Service Innovation Hub” at TEH Ambrosetti. Since 2000 he experiments with digital art as an independent researcher. Some of his projects have been acquired from the permanent ArtBase collection of Rhizome.org — NY (2002) and exhibited at the Montreal Biennial of Contemporary Art (2004), as well as at Interface Monthly (London, 2016, by The Trampery and Barbican). In 2015, he released FAC3, one of the first artworks in the world to use artificial intelligence. He is married and father of two. Want to drop a line? → riccardo [d ot) zanardelli {at} gmail [ do t} com
