I Live There With You — 2026
Poem based sculpture, drawing forms and aethetics from reconsiling with the digital outsourcing of memories, and how this creates intimite sythetic relationships with data centers.
This work started with a poem, long and rambling after some wine, written to rationalise the unease of instinctively thinking of cloud-based camera rolls and files in data centres as memories. This feels pre-cyborg, reaching for the machine that never leaves my side to recall a face, a place, or a feeling.
It is already strange, but the fact that the device doesn’t hold that information starts a chain of events pinging a cell tower hundreds of metres from me, before sending currents and light for miles across the country, or even across borders to fetch the image that I consider a memory.
Now, this obviously isn’t a unique phenomenon and is the backbone of the global world, but as someone who struggles constantly with foggy memories and a lack of short-term memory, this is a crutch that, if vanished, I believe I would lose more than most in terms of recall.
Further looking at how now, with large scraped language model AIs, these considered ‘memories’ are now almost living a life of their own, separate from me. These large models, having absorbed so much, even if allegedly not the files in my private iCloud, Google Drive, or Dropbox, so much of online content feels like memories, posts I’ve made on social media, images I’ve uploaded, shared comments written.
Most of this is minute drops in the ocean of the data farmed to feed such models make me wonder if there’s ever a word chosen or image that has some element of myself influenced somehow. Knowing that the photos that become painful memories could live free of context in these machines is horrifying and comforting in a strange sense.
The poem is a more nonsensical version of this repeating, pleading, and asking, first as an accusation to the machines, then a breakdown and request, similar in structure to how a connection is established and packaged for internet routing. I won’t include the poem here as there is never the end goal of the project, and It remains unedited as of creating the work, treating the act of sculpting and coding in its likeness as the edit itself instead.