TMS Fucial Falciform Augmentation

Seeing Before Meaning

Overview

TMS Fucial Falciform Augmentation investigates vision not as a passive intake of reality, but as an active, memory-driven construction. The project asks an impossible question: can perception be experienced before interpretation, before memory finishes the image? Rejecting screen-based AR and visual overlays, it reframes augmentation as a subtractive act. The insight is simple and radical—most of what we see is not new information, but prediction. By temporarily interrupting the neural handshake between sensory input and stored knowledge, perception itself can be destabilized.

A performative system using focused magnetic pulses momentarily depolarizes pathways in the visual cortex responsible for binding perception to memory. In these fleeting intervals, the world appears familiar yet unmoored—vision without narrative, recognition without certainty. Documented cinematically, the apparatus functions as sculpture, interface, and perceptual instrument.

This work redefines augmented reality as biologically encoded experience—shifting AR from pixels on displays to cognition itself.

AR doesn’t add to reality. It edits the editor.

Challenge

Every frame we see is already edited.

Vision feels immediate, but it isn’t. By the time the world reaches awareness, it has already been scored by memory, expectation, and narrative instinct. The challenge was to interrupt that edit—to create an experience where perception arrives before interpretation, and to do it without screens, overlays, or traditional augmented reality cues.

The “impossible” problem:

How do you momentarily let someone see the world before it knows what it’s looking at?

Insight

Augmented reality doesn’t have to add anything to the world.

Only about twenty percent of what we see is new sensory input. The rest is memory filling in the gaps. Instead of layering graphics on top of reality, this project realized AR could operate deeper—by temporarily severing the neural handshake between perception and knowledge.

If memory is what stabilizes vision, then interrupting it reveals a raw, precognitive state of seeing. A world without labels. Without certainty. Without truth baked in.

Execution

A performative machine was built around principles of focused magnetic pulses, designed to momentarily depolarize neural pathways in the visual cortex responsible for binding perception to memory.

In those brief interruptions, the world flickers into something unfamiliar—recognizable, yet unmoored. Vision without narrative. Seeing without knowing.

The experience is documented through high-resolution video that treats the apparatus not as medical hardware, but as cinematic instrument: part sculpture, part interface, part psychological trigger. The result is an embodied, time-based interaction where perception itself becomes the medium.

Impact

This project reframes augmented reality as biologically encoded experience.

Rather than adding pixels to the world, it alters the conditions under which the world is perceived—suggesting a future where AR operates at the level of cognition, not display. It challenges assumptions about truth, objectivity, and authorship in visual media, and opens a path toward experiences that don’t just show us new realities, but temporarily take certainty away.

AR stops being something you look at.

It becomes something that happens to you.