Max Cooper was developing a new live show for the Royal Albert Hall alongside a new album, Feeling is Structure. He asked us to create a series of visual works for the project, with The Shape of Memory becoming a central piece and the launch point for the album itself.

The work has since evolved across multiple formats: the original live performance at the Royal Albert Hall, subsequent audiovisual touring shows with Max, a standalone music video on YouTube, and an immersive VR experience currently in development with Phoria.

The Shape of Memory explores the fragile, fragmented nature of remembrance, the way memories drift between clarity and distortion over time. It draws on the visual language of recollection, from the deeply cherished to the quietly mundane, where certain details remain piercingly vivid while others hover just beyond reach. Memories bleed into one another, their boundaries dissolving, reshaping themselves into fictions of the mind’s own making. Fragments merge, distort, and reassemble until it becomes impossible to tell where one memory ends and another begins.

We invited Max’s audience to share photographs tied to personal memories — images of places charged with meaning, intimacy, and emotion.

Using Kling AI, we transformed these still images into simple forward-moving sequences, allowing each memory to unfold beyond the boundaries of the original frame. The AI’s hallucinations became part of the language of the piece itself: a reflection of how memory reshapes, invents, and reconstructs as we revisit it.

These generated sequences were then processed through a Gaussian splat pipeline, turning them into fragmented three-dimensional spaces — unstable architectures of recollection suspended somewhere between the real and the imagined.

Inside Houdini, we animated, lit, and rendered these environments, building multiple layers of light and atmosphere for every space. Thousands of rendered passes were then composited and sculpted together in After Effects, meticulously edited to the phrasing and emotional rhythm of the four-minute track.

Throughout the process, we carried an internal reference to Michael Gondry’s Star Guitar,  its hypnotic relationship between image, rhythm, repetition, and perception lingering quietly in the background of the work.

In April 2026, Max brought the most ambitious edition yet of his renowned AV show to the Royal Albert Hall. Conceived as both an epic retrospective of his body of work and a glimpse toward what’s next, the performance spanned his entire catalogue while introducing a bold new visual direction.

Factory Fifteen created several bespoke content pieces for the event, including Shape of Memory — a feature work developed to accompany the new album. The laser and lighting design was created by Architectural Social Club.

The content was flattened, and The Shape of Memory was released as a title track for Max’s new album ‘Feeling is Structure’ to critical acclaim online.