A floating archive of cultural amnesia – In Memory | Of Being by Yoyo Munk

In late July, an empty gallery space was transformed into a bespoke virtual exhibition. Visitors donned mixed reality headsets and found themselves surrounded by ghosts of the past. Through the lenses, black-and-white and sepia images from the last two centuries appeared across the arches and walls: unnamed portraits, landscapes without labels, fragments of memory with no clear context. They floated in midair, pulsing softly. Some even spoke. Each step carried visitors through forgotten faces and voices – a stern expression, a silent coal mine, a spectral horse.

This was In Memory | Of Being, a prototype installation by artist and scientist Yoyo Munk 1, created during their eight-week residency as SLV LAB’s first Creative Technologist-in-Residence. 

A living archive of forgetting

In Memory | Of Being is built from 'orphan' 2 materials in the Library’s vast digitised collection: photographs of unidentified subjects, recordings whose significance has been lost to time. We may know which studio produced a portrait, but not who the sitter was. We may recognise images of early industrial expansion in Victoria – mines, machines, landscapes marked for exploitation – yet lack information about the photograph's purpose.

The installation 'lives' on the fifth-floor of State Library Victoria’s La Trobe Reading Room, on the annulus overlooking the institution's soaring, iconic Dome space. Unlike many traditional exhibitions, In Memory | Of Being offers no linear path but invites wandering. Visitors drift, observe and form their own connections between the gallery’s architecture and the ghostly collection.

The visitor's experience begins with calibration: scanning a calibration marker activates the headset, and with it, the first set of images appear. Portraits and group photographs emerge, scarred by time. Some are fragmented; others overlaid with stains resembling rippling water or burns. Yoyo calls this ‘beautiful damage’. Interspersed are snapshots of the Library itself across its history: scaffolding, shelves, piles of books. Juxtaposed, these elements capture the tension between permanence and decay – the essence of the exhibition.

Yoyo Munk: 'There are many items in the library's collection where damage and decay of the original fragile media has led to a kind of beautiful transformation that completely changes their emotional resonance.'

For Yoyo, libraries are ‘an expression of the fallible memory of a culture’. The work’s title reflects this dual focus: ‘In Memory’ speaks to the desire for permanence, ‘Of Being’ to the physical experience of moving through the archive.

Turning a corner, visitors encounter the centrepiece: hundreds of images cascading through the vast Dome like a murmuration of birds. In another corridor, photographs are arranged in virtual stacks, echoing the shelving that once occupied the space. Thanks to a blueprint provided by Vanessa Ross 3, Head of Collection Access, Yoyo was able to reconstruct this architecture digitally, weaving memory into the building itself.

Later, stereographs 4 spring to life in 3D. Originally designed to be viewed using a specialised stereograph viewer, they regain their depth through the headset, showing Victorian-era scenes and eerie coal mines with new weight.

The journey ends in what Yoyo calls a ‘garden of audio’. Oral histories from the collection play in three-dimensional space. As visitors gravitate towards various group photographs – sporting clubs, army regiments – they catch fragments of conversations, layered with background sounds, offering glimpses of everyday life in early Victoria.

How the SLV LAB residency began 

It all began serendipitously. In February 2025, Tin Drum’s Kagami – a mixed-reality concert featuring a spectral Ryuichi Sakamoto – was staged at the Asia TOPA festival in Melbourne. Yoyo, who had served as technical director, was present. Among the audience were staff from State Library Victoria, curious about what mixed reality could mean in their own landmark building.

Conversations followed, including an impromptu podcast with then-CEO Paul Duldig 5 and Chief Digital Officer Paula Bray 6. By mid-year, Yoyo was invited to pilot SLV LAB’s new residency program: to imagine a bespoke installation for the fifth-floor gallery adjoining the Dome.

For Yoyo, the opportunity was irresistible. ‘The chance to do a short-term experimental project targeting the Dome is one of those opportunities that don’t come around terribly often,’ they recalled. ‘I jumped at it.’

Soon, Yoyo was embedded in the Library, working alongside Lab leads Ana Tiquia 7 and Sotirios Alpanis 8, as well as staff from Collections, Curatorial, Technology and Digital Preservation.

About Yoyo Munk 

To grasp the spirit of In Memory | Of Being, one must understand Yoyo’s unusual trajectory – ‘a convoluted, meandering path filled with luck and happenstance’, as they put it. Born in the United States, they moved to Adelaide at a young age and remained in Australia through their undergraduate education in physics. They moved into biological research for their postgraduate work, earning a PhD in integrative biology at UC Berkeley, with a dissertation on the aerodynamics of gliding in wingless canopy ants.

They later led a vision science research group at the augmented-reality company Magic Leap before turning increasingly to art. Their 2021 work Medusa, created with architect Sou Fujimoto and produced by Tin Drum, envisioned a generative architecture without physical form, shifting in response to audiences. Other projects include The Life (2019, with Marina Abramović) and Kagami (2023).

Yoyo moved back to Melbourne just this year. Before that, they were based in Pittsburgh, a city defined by steel, bridges and tunnels. Pittsburgh manufactured the machinery of American navigation, and it demands constant wayfinding from those who live there. It was a fitting home for someone whose obsessions circle around how organisms, and cultures, find their way.

Approaching the project 

Yoyo deliberately entered the residency without preconceptions. They immersed themselves in the history of libraries – the State Library of Victoria, in particular – but developed the work entirely during the residency.

‘Given the available time,’ they explained, ‘one of the early constraints I set was that I wasn’t allowed to make anything new. Everything had to come from the Library’s existing digitised collection. Every one of the several thousand images in the piece is searchable on the Library’s website.'

The gallery space assigned to Yoyo’s work still bore remnants of the Changing Face of Victoria exhibition, which closed in 2022. Rather than remove the walls of compelling black and white photographs and the mounted stereoscopes, Yoyo folded them into the project, letting the past speak to the present.

Stumbling on the stereoscopes led to one of their favourite discoveries: the Library’s vast digitised collection of vintage stereographs. With a little coding, Yoyo restored their depth in the mixed reality headset. ‘It was delightfully easy,’ they said, ‘to make a system where the perceivable depth could be restored to these images once again.’

Collaboration across the Library 

As Yoyo explored the Library’s many spaces, they relished spending time with the folks who are actively engaged in the work of an institution devoted to cultural memory. Though the coding and headset integration were solo efforts, the overall creation of In Memory | Of Being was very much a team effort. Library staff opened doors, both literal and metaphorical.

• Ana Tiquia’s (Head of Digital Strategy, Research and Insights) insights helped refine the project during the residency.
• Sotirios Alpanis (Innovation Lead, SLV LAB) and Troy Rasiah (Senior Digital Developer) contributed scripts that enabled Yoyo to work with the library’s catalogue APIs.
• Vanessa Ross (Head of Collection Access) provided an early behind-the-scenes tour, sharing stories from the institution’s history that later surfaced in the final piece.
• Bridie Flynn (Senior Collection Curator, Victorian and Australian Collections) guided Yoyo toward some of the collection’s curiosities – including the spectral horse that became the exhibition’s signature image.
• Greg Gerrand (Senior Collection Curator, Victorian and Australian Collections), Ellen Spalding (Collection Curator, Victorian and Australian Collections), and Kevin Molloy (Manager, Collection Curation and Engagement) supplied the oral history recordings.
• Betsy Earl (Senior Specialist Library Systems & Digital Preservation) assisted with image storage systems.
• Gareth Duff (Senior Network Engineer) helped establish the gallery’s network connections.

For Yoyo, these contributions reflected the openness and generosity of the library community, which they described as central to the project’s success.

Hardware and software 

Yoyo used the Magic Leap 2 headset as the base platform for the work – the same headset used for Medusa’s run at Pioneer Works in 2023, as well as for Kagami. When Kagami completed its Melbourne run in March this year, Tin Drum’s CEO Todd Eckert generously lent Munk a striking red flight case of forty-four headsets for the purposes of the LAB residency. 

The experience was ultimately built using the Unity game engine, after an early attempt at a custom OpenXR-based rendering engine was abandoned due to time constraints.

In Yoyo's work, they are attracted to constraints; their wariness around tools like Unity comes from a sense that 'it becomes entirely too easy to be tempted to put too much stuff in'. By focusing on image data, the primary development challenges were in developing performant systems for dealing with thousands of high-resolution image textures displayed simultaneously; in their words, 'you’re basically creating something that feels complex from lots of repetitions of individually simple elements, which all relies on fairly low-level functionality in graphics hardware. Unity’s handling my basic render loop and a few shader pipelines, but not much else here.'

The audio component relied on the Soundfield Audio spatialiser plugin that was developed by the audio engineering team at Magic Leap. As Yoyo explains: ‘this software takes a single channel audio file and, in real time, computes the stereo phase difference between the left and right ear so that your ears interpret the audio they're receiving as coming from a specific point in world. The effect is kind of like a surround sound audio system that follows you around as you move, and it’s honestly one of the most effective things you can do with mixed reality headsets.’

The first run 

At a preview showing, staff who had helped shape the residency, and those who weren’t involved but curious, slipped on headsets and walked into the Library’s collections as if for the first time. Members of the public followed on the weekend after, heading up the Dome’s floors before vanishing into the gallery space.

Some emerged astonished, others contemplative. For many, it was their first experience of mixed reality.

Yoyo observed: ‘There is something very poignant about wandering through these fields of unidentified portraits. People come in already primed for a sense of curiosity… the work gives them a space to go further.’

While In Memory | Of Being was conceived as an experiment, Yoyo sees broader potential. Mixed reality, they argue, offers libraries a novel way to animate their vast collections of fragile, digitised artifacts. Exhibitions could rotate far more quickly than with physical displays. Visitors might also leave with records of the images they lingered over, as well as links to catalogue records to invite them to explore further – like the post-visit digital experience embedded in ACMI’s Lens device.

Still, Yoyo posits that experiences like In Memory | Of Being are not a replacement for  traditional exhibitions or browser-based catalogue searches, but rather an alternative means of exploration: ‘[It] provides visitors with a novel and engaging perspective on the Library's collection, something that allows people to connect with Victorian culture and history as represented by the items within its collection: I see that as something worth celebrating.’

As the headsets came off and the images faded away, the Dome gallery returned to its familiar stillness. For now, In Memory | Of Being remains a fleeting encounter. It suggests that libraries are not just guardians of the past but laboratories for imagining new ways of being with history, of carrying the fragments of the forgotten into the architectures of the present.

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In Memory | Of Being is showing at State Library Victoria on 8–22 November 2025.

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