Description:

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LACUNA traces the cognitive gaps that emerge as Intelligent systems saturate the media and technological landscape, filtering into our perception and memory. These systems induce an amnesia, capturing fragments of our lives to fabricate unstable realities that continually generate and rewrite themselves, leaving us to navigate a world in flux.

 

The work reflects how we process the quiet loss of the real in favor of the poor copy, the liminal, and the uncanny. Using a discreet camera, the installation takes transient images of visitors and feeds them into a locally processed AI-driven system. With a large language model and advanced recognition technologies developed by Facebook, the work interprets perceived attributes such as clothing, emotion, and age to invent fictional memories and imagined routines, which are then transformed into nondescript, phone-like images of strangely familiar yet entirely fabricated spaces. Using open-source tools and a dataset of my own photography from the early 2000s, imperfections such as noise, grain, low resolution, and poor lighting become embedded in the images.

 

Over time, these fragments accumulate into the system’s memory, shaping its shifting worldview and emotional state. LACUNA inhabits the overlooked and the mundane, creating images that slip by disguised in nostalgia while highlighting the extractive and concealed methods employed by AI systems online. The work becomes a space of presumption, translating visitors into imagined worlds, empty rooms, fleeting snapshots, and snippets of lives never lived, reflecting less who we are and more the machine’s unstable memory of us.

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Exhibited as part of the exhibition: AI and the Paradox of Agency, 2026–2027 at Bildmuseet in Umeå