What happens when a memory belongs to no one, yet you can still feel it? The Anemoia Device, conceived by Cyrus Clarke, is built around this question and turns it into an experience that moves through image, language, and smell—transforming an analogue photograph into a one-of-a-kind fragrance. And not just any perfume, but the scent of nostalgia for a past you never lived: anemoia.

The project takes the form of a tangible machine, almost out of time, using artificial intelligence not to archive memories, but to invent them. The starting point is an analogue photograph, physically inserted into the device. From there, a short narrative is generated by a language model—never imposed on the viewer, but shaped through three tactile dials. Perspective, time, and mood become sensitive parameters: tools that steer the story and, at the same time, the emotional character of the fragrance about to emerge.

The image is distilled this way—not translated literally, but interpreted. The system operates through a multi-modal pipeline that brings generative models into dialogue with a curated scent library and a knowledge base pairing narrative structures with olfactory profiles. The result is a formula composed in real time, using up to four elements, then mixed and released through a custom olfactory display.

What gets activated isn’t a simple synesthetic exercise, but a form of embodied memory with no roots in lived experience. The fragrance becomes the carrier of a possible story—an imagined past the body recognizes as familiar without being able to place it. This is where anemoia takes shape: an intimate, uncanny sensation in which nostalgia isn’t tied to what was, but to what could have been.

The Anemoia Device moves through a hybrid territory, where artificial intelligence doesn’t replace human imagination but accompanies it in the construction of synthetic memories. A system that doesn’t preserve the past, but generates it—inviting those who step into it to question how much memories are made of facts and how much, instead, of sensations. And above all, what a story we never lived might smell like—yet for a moment, feels like it belongs to us.