MOMENTO

Masquerading as antiquated gelatin silver prints, the AI-generated series, Momento, explores the current era of photography in which the production of images is no longer tethered to lived human experience, but can be generated from an amalgamation of experiences. The ‘deja-vu’ feeling that permeates this series is thus unsurprising, given that the images emerge from a collective network of shared memories: (the internet). From fading faces to fictive locations, the uncanny details of the Momento are ghostly and dreamlike, evoking the imperfect, approximate processes of both human and machine ‘deep memory’ alike, in which details are lost but the aesthetic experience and feeling of the memory remain. As though pulled from a dust-covered family album, the images seem to present themselves as sites of recollection, stimulating nostalgic sentiments for a non-existent past. The series both threatens and soothes with the suggestion that false or corrupted memories may be even more pleasurable than actual ones. As old technologies become relics and neural networks disintegrate, we may come to question whether goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, is not also the Goddess of forgetfulness and oblivion.