Electronic music producer Max Cooper invited us to collaborate on his Royal Albert Hall special performance in April 2026. We produced 2 visual arts pieces, of which The Shape of Memory was one.

“Memory has a special aesthetic quality, being rewritten each time it’s recalled and being somewhat skewed, particular details in high resolution; others in low or entirely missing.” Max Cooper

The Shape of Memory looks to explore the fickle and often fragmented nature of our memories. Exploring the visual language behind our memories from our most fond to the mundane, in which some parts can be entirely in focus while others are always somehow just out of reach. Where the lines between one memory and another blur to create entirely fictitious memories of our minds creation until it’s impossible to know where one stops and another begins.

We wanted to bring the community in for this to make a more personal piece, crowdsourcing images from the public and within Factory Fifteen as the basis for the memories we were looking to visualise. From wedding days to rainy streets we wanted to capture a broad cross-section of life.

We’re always exploring new technology as tools to push our creative vision and were looking for something that could help us create something different. Gaussian splats had been on our radar for some time but we were inspired by the recent developments in the AppleSharp model, turning single images into splats that due to the limited sample it was generating from, naturally lent itself to hallucinating details and leaving gaps where there was no information.

Inspired by this visual aesthetic, we lent into this hallucination harder as a visual device to represent the memories. Generating deliberately short and low quality Ai videos of our base memory images to further abstract the data set to then train our gaussian splats on. Creating an interesting analogy between brain and machine. Finally taking them further with custom Houdini nodes to animate and re-light the final data set to complete a seamless memory tunnel from start to end.

Designed primarily for a performance at the Royal Albert Hall, the film was projected onto multiple screens of hologauze to create a more layered experience, with the light spilling out, making use of the architecture itself.  To enhance the experience, we created multiple exports of the film designing the front and back individually to create a more dynamic effect for the audience, allowing the content to push in space forward and back to create a sense of depth whilst also giving Max more control to mix during the show night over a simple flat lay.

On the night, the event was also captured in 360 degrees to create an immersive experience for fans at home, which we augmented further with some additional 360 renders to blend the content seamlessly into the live capture.

Shape of Memory launched the new album, Feeling Is Structure when it debuted in May 2026.