AI Creative Practice / Speculative Archive
An independent 2026 artistic-research strand examining how generative systems reconstruct memory without lived experience.
Plate — not artwork2026 —
Speculative
Archive
memory without lived experience
Generative systems · fragmented text · archival forms
Context
An independent artistic-research strand begun in 2026, working with fragmented text, archival forms and unstable generated imagery to explore absence, inherited trauma and the limits of computational understanding.
Question / Challenge
What happens when a system with no lived experience is asked to reconstruct memory? Where does plausible reconstruction end and fabrication begin?
My role
Independent artist and researcher: concept, research, image production, sequencing, editing and written framing.
Process
- Assemble fragmentary source material and archival forms as the starting condition.
- Prompt generative systems for reconstructions of scenes that have no photographic record.
- Record where output becomes confidently wrong, and keep those failures as material.
- Edit and sequence images and text into archival structures rather than single pictures.
AI contribution
Generative systems function as both medium and object of critique — producing the speculative imagery while demonstrating, in their errors, what computational reconstruction cannot reach.
Human judgement
Selection, sequencing, framing and refusal. The decision about what is shown, what is withheld and what is described in words rather than images is entirely authorial.
- Research question
- Archival source material
- Constraints and refusal
- Selection and sequencing
- Art direction
- Ethical judgement
- Written framing
- Generation
- Variation
- Speculative reconstruction
Output
An expanding body of images, texts and archival structures. Presentation format is in development.
AI disclosure
- The subject of the work is machine reconstruction itself; generative imagery is the only appropriate material.
- Historical and archival references underpinning the work are checked against sources; generated imagery is never presented as documentary.
- Confident invention of period detail, and smoothing of ambiguity into resolved, legible scenes.
- Output that read as convincing pseudo-documentary was removed or deliberately destabilised.
- Concept, research, editorial selection, sequencing and all written material.
- Generated imagery is labelled as generated. The work does not present synthetic images as evidence of real events.
Plate — not artwork2026 —
Speculative
Archive
memory without lived experience
Generative systems · fragmented text · archival forms
Reflection
The work is most useful where the system fails: fluent, confident output that has no referent makes the gap between reconstruction and memory legible.