Dog Filter
What Happens to Memory After Simulation?

Dog Filter is a philosophical art essay that takes Jack Warne’s practice as a starting point to explore the relationship between memory, technology and simulation. Beginning with the haziness of decade-old phone photographs and early digital filters, the essay considers how memory is formed through acts of looking, filling in and reconstruction. Drawing on the ideas of Henri Bergson, Frederic Bartlett, Daniel Kahneman and Jean Baudrillard, it asks whether technology can ever truly restore the past.

The essay also introduces the concept of Memory Compatibility, describing the way technologically generated images can be accepted as real when they align with our existing emotional and narrative structures. Through Jack’s use of glitches, low resolution, rendering errors and failed simulation, the essay ultimately argues that technology has not transformed memory so much as made its underlying process visible: memory has always been shaped through selection, supplementation and continual reconstruction.

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When we look back at photographs from ten years ago, they always seem to carry a certain haziness. That haziness comes partly from the low resolution of the image itself, and partly from the traces that time has left on memory; or perhaps it emerges from a state in which the two have gradually begun to overlap. A blurred photograph, layered over a blurred memory, slowly seeps into the way we feel as we look at it.

A photograph is like a fuse, drawing the mind back towards a moment that has long been forgotten. Scattered fragments begin to resurface. We look again and again, piecing them together, attempting to complete the images that have already gone missing. Until, at a certain moment, everything becomes clear, and we feel as though we remember once more. Yet what has actually become clearer: the past itself, or our understanding of it? Did those gradually completed details, coherent sequences and forms of logic used to fill the gaps ever truly exist? Or were they repeatedly rearranged and reorganised through each act of remembering, eventually becoming another story convincing enough to be believed? We tend to assume that photographs preserve the past, and so each act of looking appears to return us to a moment that has already ended. But if what a photograph preserves is never memory itself, and only the condition through which memory begins to operate again, then each act of looking is not a return to the past, but another beginning. Roland Barthes describes the photograph as evidence of a moment that “has been”. It confirms that something once stood before the camera, yet it cannot restore the experience surrounding that moment. The photograph preserves a trace of existence rather than memory itself (Barthes, 1981). The photograph is therefore no longer simply a medium through which the past is viewed. It becomes more like a mirror. What it reflects is not the moment that once existed, but the way in which we, in the present, have come to understand that moment again. When we look at a photograph, we imagine that we are looking at the past; in fact, we are also watching memory take place.

In my understanding, Jack’s practice revolves around an almost uncompromising proposition: we can never truly return to the past through photographs, or through any other form of simulation. For him, the image is not a route into memory, but an ongoing act of translation. Each time we look again, remember again or reconstruct again, what we approach is no longer the moment that once existed, but a version shaped collectively by time, technology and present consciousness. In other words, every act of retrieval also implies another act of rewriting.

No Way Back

Jack poses a distinctly twenty-first-century question: why, even as technology continues to advance, are we still unable to return to the past through any form of simulation? This question forms a displaced dialogue with Henri Bergson’s thinking on memory from more than a century ago. The two were not discussing the same thing, yet they arrive at the same dilemma from different directions. Jack questions technology; Bergson questions memory itself. Have we misunderstood memory from the beginning, imagining it as a static object stored somewhere in the mind, waiting to be fully retrieved?

In Matter and Memory, Bergson proposes that memory is not the storage of the past, but the continual actualisation of the past in the present. Each act of remembering is not the extraction of an existing fact, but a process through which present perception, emotion and experience reselect and rearrange fragments scattered across the past, allowing them to acquire new relations and meanings in the present. In other words, the past is never a complete origin waiting to be discovered. It is continuously reorganised and reconstructed through every act of remembering. If Bergson’s understanding is accepted, Jack’s question undergoes a fundamental shift. The impossibility of simulation may not begin with technology at all, but with memory itself (Bergson, 1911).

Technology fails to reproduce the past perfectly not because it remains insufficiently precise, but because there is no complete and fixed past waiting for either human beings or machines to retrieve it faithfully. What technology attempts to simulate is never a stable object, but a process that is itself continuously moving and being rewritten.

The relationship between Jack and Bergson is therefore not one in which the former is proven by the latter, nor one in which Bergson merely supplies a theoretical foundation for Jack’s practice. Instead, they approach one another from opposite ends of the same problem, across different periods and contexts. Jack begins with the failure of simulation and moves towards memory, while Bergson begins with the nature of memory and explains why no form of simulation could ever truly reach it.What cannot be reproduced is not the past itself, but memory.

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If Bergson dismantles the idea of memory as a form of storage, Frederic Bartlett addresses how such memory operates in the actual process of recollection.

Bergson tells us that the past is not a complete file stored in the mind, and that every act of remembering is a process through which the past takes on form again in the present. Yet this leaves another question unanswered: if we are not retrieving a complete memory, how do coherent sequences, specific details and clear images appear when we remember?

Bartlett’s research on memory offers a more concrete answer. In Remembering, he understands memory as a process of reconstruction rather than reproduction. We do not preserve an experience in its entirety and later replay it without alteration. Instead, what remains is often no more than partial fragments, emotional contours and an overall impression. When remembering occurs again, present knowledge, language, cultural habits, emotional states and self-understanding all participate in rearranging these fragments and filling in their absences. Memory is therefore able to reappear in the form of a complete story not because every detail has been preserved, but because we actively establish an order for what remains incomplete. Missing parts are inferred and restored, confused sequences are rearranged, and emotions that resist explanation are placed within a narrative of cause and effect. The coherence of a memory does not necessarily come from the event itself, but from the order we impose upon it in the present. Just as a blurred photograph can evoke sounds, smells and events that do not appear within the image, the details that return to us may not all have existed in the original experience. They may instead have gradually attached themselves to it through later acts of remembering (Bartlett, 1932).

Bergson and Bartlett are not repeating the same point. Bergson is concerned with the mode of existence of memory: how the past is actualised again in the present. Bartlett is concerned with the mechanism of reconstruction: how incomplete fragments are organised through existing cognitive structures into a story that can be understood and believed. The former breaks apart the idea that memory can be retrieved in its entirety; the latter explains why an experience that was never fully preserved can still become concrete, coherent and even unquestionably real within the mind (Bergson, 1911; Bartlett, 1932).

Yet when an experience is reorganised through memory, it changes more than our understanding of the past. It also alters the way we understand who we are in the present. This is the problem revealed by Daniel Kahneman’s distinction between the Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self. The Experiencing Self is the self situated within an event, feeling it moment by moment. The Remembering Self, by contrast, appears after the event has ended. It selects particular fragments, constructs a narrative around the experience and forms an overall judgement of it. Both encounter the same life, but they do not necessarily preserve the same reality. An experience may contain a vast number of subtle, contradictory and even conflicting feelings. But when the Remembering Self looks back, this complexity is often reduced to a small number of decisive moments and a conclusion that can be narrated. What remains in memory is not how each moment was experienced, but how the experience was later organised into a story. That story determines not only how we understand the past, but also how we judge relationships, places, trauma and happiness, ultimately shaping the choices we make in the future (Kahneman, 2011).

Kahneman therefore moves Bartlett’s question from the formation of memory to the formation of the self. If Bartlett explains how we use the present to fill the gaps of the past, Kahneman reveals how these filled, removed and reordered memories eventually return to constitute the self we believe ourselves to be. We do not simply possess memories; in a certain sense, we also live within the versions of memory that we have created. From this perspective, photographs and images are no longer merely media that point towards the past. When they trigger memory, they simultaneously intervene in the process through which memory is reconstructed. A photograph can strengthen certain fragments while allowing others to disappear. It can provide a visible centre for an indistinct experience, around which later narratives continue to grow. As each act of looking is repeated, the image contained within the photograph gradually merges with everything we have added beyond it, until it becomes difficult to distinguish what came from the original experience and what came from later imagination. A photograph is therefore both a trace left by the past and material through which the past is manufactured again in the present (Bartlett, 1932; Kahneman, 2011).

Memory Compatibility

We can begin with a more direct phenomenon: when we see an old photograph restored by AI, why does it often appear to be “more real”? This feeling arrives almost naturally. The image becomes clearer, colour is restored, and the people depicted seem closer to the way we imagine them. Everything produces the illusion that we are finally seeing what the past truly looked like.

Yet this feeling of having moved “closer to reality” does not come from the restoration of history. It comes from a more subtle compatibility: the image happens to correspond with the way we have already imagined that past.

From this perspective, what technology performs is not simply restoration, but generation. AI does not know what actually happened in the past. It can only use data and probability to infer a version that appears most likely to have existed. This version is convincing not because it is accurate, but because it is sufficiently plausible and sufficiently compatible with our existing expectations.

Here, Baudrillard’s concept of simulation no longer concerns only the opposition between falsity and truth. It reveals a more ambiguous condition. What confronts us is not merely an illusion attempting to replace reality, but a generated result that corresponds closely with the internal structure of memory. It succeeds because it echoes the way in which we have already learned to understand the past. This returns us to memory itself. Bartlett argues that recollection is never a reproduction of the past, but a reconstruction shaped by present experience. Kahneman’s Remembering Self similarly forms a narratable self through the continual reorganisation of experience. In other words, human beings are already accustomed to understanding the past through acts of generation. When technology begins to operate in a similar way, it does not overturn memory. It enters into a logic that was already present within memory itself. What we believe is therefore no longer simply an event that once occurred, but a version that remains coherent and persuasive after repeated acts of reconstruction. Under these conditions, simulation is no longer simply a critique of technological authenticity. It raises a more fundamental question: when human beings and technology are both generating memory, can we still distinguish between what “happened” and what was “constructed”? Or have we always depended less upon the past itself than upon a narrative that can be understood and believed? (Bartlett, 1932; Baudrillard, 1994; Kahneman, 2011).

I propose understanding this condition as Memory Compatibility. It does not mean that technology has successfully reproduced memory. Rather, it describes the degree to which technologically generated content remains compatible with the version of memory already formed within us. It does not need to correspond perfectly with history, nor does it need to reproduce every detail of what once occurred. It only needs to align sufficiently with the way we understand the past, with its emotional structure and narrative logic, in order to be accepted as “real”. Technology becomes convincing not because it reconstructs the past more accurately than human beings, but because it begins to operate in a way that closely resembles human memory. It also infers, supplements, orders and generates, reorganising scattered fragments into a coherent story. What changes is not the mechanism through which memory is generated, but the fact that this mechanism has, for the first time, been externalised and shared with technology. This externalisation also recalls Bernard Stiegler’s account of technical memory, in which technologies of inscription do not simply store human experience from the outside, but participate in the ways the past becomes available and intelligible in the present (Stiegler, 2009). 

Glitch: Jack’s Methodology

If the previous discussion has attempted to answer the question of how memory is formed, Jack’s work is concerned with another problem: what role does technology play once it begins to participate in that process?

In our conversations, Jack repeatedly returned to the same question:

What happens to memory after simulation?

(Warne, personal communication, 20 May 2026)

What is interesting is that this question was not presented as a fixed theory. It was continually revised through the course of our conversations. He initially spoke of memory recall, later shifted towards simulation, and eventually began to consider how the failure of simulation might alter our perception of a particular moment. This continuous revision of language resembles the process of memory itself: there is no stable definition, only a provisional understanding that gradually emerges through repeated acts of approximation, correction and reorganisation. It is for this reason that I do not understand Jack’s work as demonstrating how technology simulates memory. Rather, it demonstrates how simulation fails (Warne, personal communication, 20 May 2026).

Contemporary technology continually attempts to conceal the process of simulation. AI seeks to generate seamless images; restoration technologies encourage us to believe that missing parts once appeared exactly as they are now presented; algorithms continually strive to make generated results appear more natural and more real. Jack’s work, however, moves in the opposite direction. He preserves the fractures within these processes of generation: delay, low resolution, compression artefacts, rendering errors, scanning residues and signal noise. These elements are not simply a form of digital aesthetics, nor are they a formal fascination with the glitch. They constitute a philosophical position. If human memory is already founded upon reconstruction, what Jack preserves are the traces of this reconstruction that cannot be concealed. He does not attempt to make technology resemble memory more closely. Instead, he exposes the moment in which technology fails to become memory. Unfinished rendering, distorted imagery and fractured experiences of time do not simply remind us of technology’s immaturity; they remind us that memory itself is equally filled with gaps, interruptions and omissions. The failure within the work is therefore not a technical failure, but a deliberately preserved method. It refuses to allow viewers to imagine that they have truly returned to the past. Instead, it continually reminds us that what we are seeing is only a version that remains in the process of being generated. It is within these failures that simulation becomes visible for the first time.

Returning to Memory Compatibility, Jack’s work reveals a further contradiction. We accept technologically generated versions of the past not because they are sufficiently real, but because they are sufficiently compatible with the memories we have already reconstructed. Jack, however, does not attempt to perfect that compatibility. Instead, he deliberately keeps it within a state of incomplete correspondence. Hito Steyerl understands the poor image through its degradation, circulation and loss of resolution. Jack’s use of low-resolution imagery shares this visible instability, but shifts its emphasis away from circulation and towards recollection: degradation becomes a way of exposing the distance between an image and the memory it appears to contain (Steyerl, 2009). The fractures that remain force us to recognise that the image before us is neither the past itself nor a version capable of fully replacing it. It is a continuously changing process generated collectively by memory, technology and the viewer. What Jack’s work truly simulates is not the past, but the human attempt to return to the past—and the inevitable failure of that attempt. If contemporary technology tries to erase the traces of simulation, Jack turns those traces into the work itself. If technology asks us to believe that it has finally reached reality, Jack continually reminds us that what deserves our attention may not be the past that has been reproduced, but the way we attempt to return to it again and again, inevitably recreating it with every return.

Jack asks:

What happens to memory after simulation?

(Warne, personal communication, 20 May 2026)

What we should be asking is not what happens to memory after simulation, but whether memory has always existed through some form of simulation—or whether memory itself is only an illusion continually sustained through reconstruction. Simulation has not changed memory. It has simply allowed us to see, for the first time, that memory has always been an ongoing process of selection, arrangement, supplementation and reconstruction. Technology did not create this process. It externalised it, allowing it to appear before us for the first time in a form that is clear, concrete and even visible.

It is precisely because of this irreversible nature that memories and the past remain precious. They are like the wind: impossible to hold. We have never truly returned to ten years ago through a photograph. What has really happened is that ten years ago has continued to arrive in the present, each time we look again.

References

Bartlett, F.C. (1932) Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Barthes, R. (1981) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by R. Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. 

Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by S.F. Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Bergson, H. (1911) Matter and Memory. Translated by N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer. New York: Macmillan.

Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Allen Lane.

Steyerl, H. (2009) ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, e-flux journal, 10. 

Stiegler, B. (2009) Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. Translated by S. Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Primary Source

Warne, J. (2026) WhatsApp conversation with the author, 20 May. Unpublished personal communication.