Pandemic Papers

Pandemic Papers is an experimental archive. The project logs my feelings within the context of the headlines, painted on the Sunday editions of my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle. The project consists of over 40 paintings ranging in size from 8’ x 10’ to 1’ x 1’ created from November 2019, when COVID first appeared in Wuhan, to July 2021, when San Francisco finally retired its emergency order (hopefully?). Pandemic Papers gave me a way to store and recall my own personal experience of the pandemic despite my long term memory loss due to my brain injury.

The pandemic changed a lot about our lives and world so it makes sense that it would also lead to a major shift in my work. This is the first time in my practice I turned to painting as the critical tool for understanding the world. I have long been resistant to the medium but when used in relationship with the weekly churn of the newspaper it gave me a new way of finding where, when, who and how I was within that timeless time.

Genealogy

Genealogy is a hand-made book made using a reclaimed binder and transparencies. Starting at the back of the book I drew images on one side of each transparency with each new image created in direct reference to the image/s that came before it. Looking at any page the transparences allow you to see backward and forward in the stack only a few pages as soon they disappear behind the hazy of the plastic sheets themselves. Flipping thru the book from the beginning takes you back in time and back thru a lineage of ancestors.

Prosthetic Memory

Prosthetic Memory is an ongoing experiment in self-augmentation combining handmade journals, daily videos, and a custom AI. With the journal laying flat on a desk a camera captures its pages. The AI compares this feed to its model, determines which page is showing, and projects an associated video memory on the desk nearby. Created to replace the artist's long term memory which was damaged by a childhood brain injury, Prosthetic Memory explores questions like:

-When memories are external, mediated, and public what is the difference between how they are experienced by their creator and an audience?

-Do our assumptions, fears, and uses for AI change when data and machine learning models are created by individuals and families at personal, instead of corporate, scale?

-Given our increasing exposure to algorithmic interventions, how do our identities and perceptions shift when we see ourselves and others through that lens?

The first iteration of Prosthetic Memory, captured in the documentation provided, created a bridge between the physical and virtual components of the memory. In upcoming iterations an age-malleable recreation (deep fake) of the artist will appear on a screen above the notebook, reading from its pages, and, using NLP and sentiment analysis, pointing the user to other pages and videos with similar events or feelings.

Version 1.0 was first exhibited at the Recoding CripTech show at SOMA arts in 2020.

The project was awarded a STARTS Prize 2020 Honorary Mention. 

While AI was a hot topic in the art and wider world as we slid into a new decade, it was often conceptualized as distant, strange and uncontrollable. Prosthetic Memory makes it extremely intimate. It is, to quote mathemusician Vi Hart "a chunk of myself I’ve externalized and personified as “other” in order to experiment with my perspective and my desires."

This project was first exhibited at the Recoding CripTech show at SOMA arts in 2020 and awarded a STARTS Prize 2020 Honorary Mention. 

While AI was a hot topic in the art and wider world as we slid into a new decade, it was often conceptualized as distant, strange and uncontrollable. Prosthetic Memory makes it extremely intimate. It is, to quote mathemusician Vi Hart "a chunk of myself I’ve externalized and personified as “other” in order to experiment with my perspective and my desires."

Amnesia Diaries

Brain damage acquired in childhood has left M with minimal long-term memory. This project was their first attempt at building a prosthetic replacement. Using a combination of videos and writing addressed to their future self the artist spent May 2018 - August 2020 building up a dataset which would later be used in building Prosthetic Memory.