• Algorithmic Erasure and Data Decay in Vernacular Archives Directory

    This project takes 48 vintage family portraits and subjects them to a strict digital protocol: every single person is systematically erased from the frame. This removal is not a poetic metaphor for death or forgetting; it is a literal measurement of lost information. What remains on the photographic surface is an empty slot—a physical hole cut into the document.

    To patch these blank spaces, an AI program (generative fill) is forced to reconstruct the missing backgrounds. Because the algorithm only reads the pixels that are left and has no memory of the original people or places, its guesses are distorted, unstable, and glitched.

    These visual anomalies are not software malfunctions. They are mathematical proof that the original reality is permanently unrecoverable. The family album stops functioning as a keeper of memories and is converted into a cold inventory of digital scars, where the AI's error becomes the only visible truth.