MECHANICAL_MEMORIES unfolds like a looping dream: a procession of impossible vehicles, deformed yet recognizable, moving between childhood nostalgia and digital hallucination. These are not cars, but emotional machines, narrative tools that turn memory into image, recollection into distortion, imagination into pixels.

It all begins with a simple picture: a child holding an ice cream, staring at an SUV in a parking lot. In that moment, Chris had the realization that would mark his creative journey: the awareness that the world surrounding him wasn’t simply “given,” but designed by humans. That early fascination with vehicles was not just aesthetic passion but the understanding of the power of design to shape reality, and with it, our desires.

Chris’s training in Industrial Design shaped his ability to think in terms of constraints, modularity, and seriality. Over the years, designing bottles, chairs, and mass-produced objects, he also confronted the limits of a world saturated with products, many destined to become obsolete. From there came the shift toward the digital: a space to create without adding material weight, where design becomes pure visual and perceptual experience.

In MECHANICAL_MEMORIES, Chris symbolically returns to the world of cars, cartoons, and motorized dreams. His references include cult films, television series, dream cars never owned, and suggestions from friends. Each work holds a personal memory yet resonates universally: the Jeep seen as a child, the car from the big screen, the vehicle everyone once desired. It is an emotional atlas of car bodies, reimagined through the filter of digital distortion.

At the heart of the collection lies process. Chris selects a vehicle, flips it to the left (opposite of automotive photography conventions), passes it through a distorting filter that bends its lines into unstable trails. He then reduces the palette to 10 colors, adds scanned and dithered glitter cardstock backgrounds, and fine-tunes the chromatic mood.

The result is a paradox: a methodical, almost industrial procedure that produces unstable, fluid images, always on the verge of dissolution. As if memory itself were a defective assembly line, each frame preserving and erasing at once.

This process also reflects the artist’s personal perceptual condition. For years Chris has lived with HPPD (Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder), which alters his vision: trails, sparkles, constant movement. The works are a pixelated, amplified translation of that state: images that do not reproduce reality but convey the experience of perceiving it in perpetual vibration and instability.

The 128x72 pixel, 16:9 format is another constraint turned into poetics. In an era of ultra-high definition, Chris chooses large, “chunky” pixels, evoking blurred memories, worn-out VHS tapes, dreams slipping away.

The choice to mint everything fully on-chain reinforces this tension: on one side, the guarantee of eternity; on the other, an aesthetic of fragility, declaring itself prone to dissolving before the viewer’s eyes. It is a collision between permanence and instability, between eternal code and fleeting recollection.

The mood running through the collection is one of psychedelic nostalgia, personal to the artist, yet open to the viewer. Looking at these vehicles does not transport us through space, but through time: back to afternoons spent watching cartoons, to the longing for a car glimpsed only in a film, to the fantasy of a race that never happened.

These works speak of movement, but an inner movement: an invitation to reconnect with imagination, to see, if only for a moment—the world through Chris’s eyes.

Ultimately, MECHANICAL_MEMORIES is not a collection of cars, but a visual diary composed of glitches, dreams, and distortions. An exploration of how fragile and powerful memory can be, and how design itself can become poetic language.

In an age dominated by high definition and digital perfection, Chris offers the opposite: unstable vehicles that will never take us anywhere literal, but that shift the terrain of our emotions.