German multidisciplinary artist Lilian C. Scheuer prints a fictional brain error message onto thermal receipt paper, then erases it with hand sanitizer, using the impermanence of the medium to enact an acceptance of forgetting as a necessary rather than a terrible thing.
In computing, Out Of Memory is an error code: the device has run out of available storage and can no longer function properly. Lilian C. Scheuer borrowed the concept and applied it to the human brain, asking what a neural data overload message might look like, and what it would mean if everyday forgetting simply did not exist.
The work, made in 2024 as part of her graduation project Dear My Memories, begins with a fictional error message written as if generated by a brain experiencing storage overflow. She printed it on thermal paper using a receipt printer, choosing the medium deliberately: thermal prints are inherently impermanent, their heat-reactive dye fading over time, making them an apt analogue for memories that dissolve. Then she applied hand sanitizer directly to the print. The sanitizer breaks down the thermal paper’s protective barrier, causing the ink to dissolve rapidly. In doing so, Scheuer participated in, and dramatically accelerated, the very process of erasure the work is about.
The conceptual foundation comes from psychologist Daniel L. Schacter’s Seven Sins of Memory, which argues that forgetting is not a failure of the memory system but a necessary feature of it. Schacter’s concept of transience, the automatic deletion of unused information, is what keeps the brain functional. Scheuer, by her own admission someone who had always experienced forgetting as loss, found in this framework a reorientation.
“In this context, remembering and forgetting are revealed not as competitors, as good and bad,” she writes in her accompanying research publication, “but as two sides of the same coin, the Yin and Yang of the natural mechanisms within human memory.”
The act of erasing the print is her enactment of that acceptance.
The final installation presents the modified thermal print within a collapsing pop-up message format, the visual information censored and partially dissolved, the error message itself becoming the thing it describes.
Lilian C. Scheuer is a multidisciplinary artist and graphic designer based in Germany, born 2002. Her practice investigates the psychological circumstances of human nature in the context of the post-digital age, working across audiovisual work, installation and printed matter.
Website: lilian-c-scheuer.com Instagram: @lilian.c.scheuer
Out Of Memory (OOM), 2024. Thermal print, hand sanitizer, installation. Part of the graduation project Dear My Memories. All photography: Lilian C. Scheuer.
