Patch Notes: RWM (Real World Manipulation) frames my practice as an ongoing system update, an evolving reconstruction of the world shaped by memory, spontaneity, and digital life. The term patch notes suggests revisions, glitches, corrections, and unexpected adjustments. In this exhibition, it becomes a metaphor for how images, memories, and fragments of lived experience continually shift during the painting process. Nothing remains stable; every element is subject to transformation.

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My work begins with a digital collage, but the collage functions not as a final plan but as a provisional constellation, a temporary arrangement of fragments gathered from personal photographs, social media, dream imagery, and imagined scenes. These images coexist without hierarchy, forming a hybrid visual field where everyday reality merges with subconscious material and digital detritus. The collage becomes the first “patch,” the earliest version of a world in progress.

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This approach resonates with the fluid and reconstructive nature of memory. Drawing from Marianne Hirsch’s idea that collage “materializes the fragmented nature of memory, showing how the past is continually reshaped by the present,” the work mirrors how memory behaves: nonlinear, unstable, and perpetually updated. The digital study holds one version of memory; the painting reveals what memory becomes after spontaneity, emotion, and intuition intervene. In this sense, the act of painting becomes a lived patch note, an ongoing process of editing, correcting, forgetting, and re-remembering.

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— Chesca Santiago