IN 2022, IN THE ATTIC OF A FORMER 19TH-CENTURY HORSE STABLE REPURPOSED AS AN ARTIST RESIDENCY, DV HAD A FOCAL EPILEPTIC SEIZURE.

She did not lose her ability to walk, to choose a language, to descend a staircase. What she lost, briefly, was the third stage of the Abhidharma cognitive sequence: discernment. From her seat, before consciousness returned, she had asked the colleague beside her:

An aura is what precedes the seizure. In DV's case, external reality and her inner world are no longer separated. Amnesia comes next. At most, she is able to capture a single word.

The text returned above is not a description nor a deciphering of this linguistic residual. It is an attempt to capture, using computational means, the possible cognitive trajectories of the out of consciousness experience. This structuring pairs up with Francisco Varela’s theory of embodied minds that do not operate though symbolisms or pattern recognition.

A computational system is not an autopoietic machine. Humberto Maturana and Varela are are clear stating that living beings do not have inputs and outputs in the way a chatbot does.

However, it could be possible to incorporate machines into our cognitive processes. Prostheses that amplify our capacity to expand consciousness.

The proposal of this prototype is that altered states of consciousness such as the epileptic aura, the dream fragment, the shamanic ecstasy, are neurological interstices where generative AI could enter as prosthesis. A bird is up on a tree and she is going to jump into the void. Her neurological journey is not mathematical.