There are correct systems and wrong systems. A correct system is looking at a dirty room and immediately cleaning it, taking no time for breaks. A wrong system is being unable to clean up your room for months no matter how desperately you want it clean. There is a system for grieving properly. There is a system for learning properly. There are grades and assessments and reviews based on numbers and major requirements and classes you can only take once in your life.

• A condition of logical or comprehensible arrangement among the separate elements of a group.


• A condition of methodical or prescribed arrangement among component parts such that proper functioning or appearance is achieved.

Memory is not linear, logical or comprehensible. It is not a straight, long spaghetti noodle that can be cut at different lengths. Instead, memory is cellophane in various colours that overlap each other in varying shapes. It has different weights that poke through the layers like those bowling balls they throw on mattresses to show you its strength on TV. Memory is nonsensical but makes sense if you think about it hard enough. You wonder why you can vividly remember the feeling of sand between your toes on a grey beach day but not the name of the location where it happened. Or you wonder why each season feels the same as last year. Where February is the same as every February before it and the last grasp of winter slowly loses its hold.

“Memory Processing Unit” (MPU) is an application I made in February. It was meant to be the mold that you threw away after you casted your sculpture. Instead it became a flexible, multi-purpose system that takes any video input and processes it and creates an output. It compares to a radio or a television, where the data is processed in a certain way and it is broadcasted to the world. Whereas television processes video and audio data in an orderly fashion, MPU takes a different approach. It randomly selects which clips to play and when, it alters their colours and contrast, and it fades in and out erratically with no logic, all in real time.

I identify as neurodivergent. In the same vein, everything I create is through the lens of being neurodivergent. During the course of making “Memory Processing Unit” I experienced a hypomanic episode and continued living my day to day life as someone with unmedicated ADHD and other brain sludge. So my mind was stuck in February, as it always is when February happens. And February is dreary and depressing, so doing anything in February requires me to preface that this was made during February. I think in circles much more in February, but my baseline is a healthy dose of at least a circle every day. February to me is a constant hope for more sunlight. It is also around the time where I finally get rid of all the Christmas decorations that litter my house. February was also when I made a self-portrait film of me and my sister taking down a Christmas tree and when I went out to the beach to sit on some rocks alongside her. Though the events happened in two different years, the Christmas tree and the beach, they still occupy the same position in my mind. It was the knot of February.

So as with every idea that keeps circling my mind, I wanted to make a video project about February in February.

And it didn’t work originally. I was frustrated by linear forms of video making. I couldn’t place these video clips of myself in two different but similar Februaries side by side. I needed them to overlap and tangle and mix without my hand choosing what comes next. I needed an emerging, never ending output that’d closely portray how I felt about February: a collection of memories that do not follow strict patterns. Memories in disorder. Memories that, at the time of recollecting, were contending with the failing of my system on how to process my emotions on an hour to hour basis.

• The act or operation of putting something through a prescribed process.


• The act of taking something through a set of prescribed procedures.

What originally came as a single system to process for one idea that I had soon became a framework that I could apply to future projects. “Memory Processing Unit” isn’t solely intended for February, but for any other clips that I decide to input. I began to think more about this system and how it works and why I wanted it to work in specific ways. As such I created a list of rules for myself to follow when working on MPU.

“Memory Processing Unit” is a sailboat on the sea. The waves can carry it wherever it wants and it has no sail. You only have several jackets to create a makeshift one. The different jackets work differently, but you never end at a destination. The view is never the same twice though, and that is why you are on the sailboat in the first place. In fact, you’ve always been on this sailboat since the beginning. It takes you days to formulate a response to an essay and it takes your lifetime to barely understand the experiences you’ve been through. Processing memory is not easy, but it is the work of a disordered system that no one has fully grasped yet.