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Artworks
Ivona Tau
A life passed by, 2025A Life Passed By is a meditation on memory, identity, and loss—an AI-driven reconstruction of a fading family archive that explores how personal history is reshaped through the lenses of both technology and forgetting. Rooted in the found photography and home video footage of my maternal lineage, this project is a tribute to my grandmother, Krystyna Krzywicka, and the decades quietly documented before dementia gradually erased her ability to recall them.
The work draws from a trove of analog materials I inherited after my grandparents' passing: negatives taken by my grandfather on Soviet-era cameras in the 1960s and 70s—many of which were never developed—and video captured with an 8mm Japanese Jelco Zoom camera. These images form a raw archive of everyday life in post-Soviet Eastern Europe: vacations, domestic scenes, snowy streets of Vilnius and Riga, and portraits of a young mother and her daughters. After decades in storage, these images have now been digitized and used as a training dataset for training of a custom generative AI model.
The curatorial theme guiding this piece is the interplay between recollection and reimagination—how memory, especially in the context of dementia, becomes fluid, distorted, and increasingly fictional. In my grandmother’s final years, she often mistook identities, relived childhood episodes, and merged timelines into a singular internal reality. I was fascinated by the emotional truth of that world, even as it diverged from objective fact. Using AI, I attempted to recreate that space—not as a document of the past, but as an emotional echo of it.
I trained a series of Stable Diffusion-based models in Python on this archive to create images and motion sequences that evoke a memory-like quality: scenes rendered in familiar forms but always slightly altered, faces that resemble but never fully replicate. The generative process introduces visual glitches, surreal transitions, and uncanny approximations that mirror how memory itself falters and reshapes. These artifacts become metaphors for neurological decay—reminding us that forgetting is not merely loss, but transformation.
This work continues the narrative from my previous series, UnBeautiful, which challenged the homogenization of female beauty in AI-generated imagery. In A Life Passed By, I extend that interrogation to the erasure and recovery of personal memory. Both projects reclaim agency within systems that tend toward generalization, asserting the value of subjectivity, imperfection, and emotional nuance.
Ultimately, this piece exists in the tension between preservation and disappearance. While it attempts to rescue a personal and cultural history from oblivion, it also embraces the truth that memory—human or artificial—is inherently flawed, always partial. The AI becomes not a historian but a dreamer, offering speculative fragments of lives once lived.
A Life Passed By is both a personal homage and a broader reflection on how we remember, what we forget, and how new technologies might participate in the fragile work of holding onto the past—while acknowledging that some parts will always remain just out of reach.Copyright The Artist
