Project by Steven Duncan
This project is grounded in a growing cultural impulse to archive more than objects. As AI and digital media proliferate, there is an increasing push to preserve, reanimate, or even revive lost loved ones through data. Products already exist that promise to reconstruct memory through voice, image, and interaction, offering the illusion that no one ever has to be fully lost. I am drawn to this provocation, but I am also deeply unsettled by it. What does it mean to digitize a person, and what do we believe we are actually preserving when we try to do so?
Historically, archives have centered on tangible things. Objects can be scanned, catalogued, and stored. They have edges, weight, and form. Yet culture has never lived solely in objects. I learned my culture through elders, through sound, through presence, and through relationships that resist stabilization. This project focuses on the widening gap between what can be archived and what cannot, questioning the limits of preservation and the costs of mistaking data for memory.
