Kika Nicolela's SCRAPS series continues the artist's ongoing examination of memory: over a decade ago, she began working with family films and images, both found footage and her personal archive. Nicolela has always been fascinated by the function that archival images play in the development of our memories and identities. Her mother's Alzheimer's disease has most recently influenced her study.
Nicolela fed an AI her personal archive of family photos and children's drawings for the series. The AI interpreted and blended multiple supplied images and then Nicolela mixed many of the outputs to create the series' multi-layered digital collages.
The resulting works retain a sense of nostalgia, mimicking emotionally charged fragments of personal memories; pieces of fictional lives and stories upon which the viewers project their own feelings and reminiscences. Both poetic and poignant, SCRAPS reminds us of how our memories are profoundly imperfect and vulnerable machines.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
SCRAPS is part of the exhibition RECOLLECTION. AI AND MEMORY presented by EXPANDED.ART in collaboration with The NFT Gallery at their galleries in New York and London, 11 April – 13 May 2023.
19 artists explore the idea of further challenging the concreteness of human memory—personal or collective—through creative collaboration with AI.
Memories are nebulous. Scientific studies and phenomena such as "The Mandela Effect" have shown that humans rarely recall things in their unbiased exactitude. Artificial Intelligence already assists human memory in the form of predictive text and GPS navigation. One would surmise that there exists a role for AI when it comes to supplementing even more complex memory.
Artists: Crashblossom, Ilya Bliznets, Anna Dart, Olga Fedorova, Ross Goodwin, Danielle King, Margaret Murphy, Kika Nicolela, Roope Rainisto, Daria Rastunina, Manuel Rossner, Travis LeRoy Southworth, Anne Spalter, Nathaniel Stern, Sasha Stiles, Stephan Vasement, Nicola Villa, Sabato Visconti, and Erika Weitz.
ABOUT THE NFT
Contract address: KT1NXryCaPvxun2NJkjtaFgh9GQcygqd5xpt
Blockchain: Tezos
Metadata: Frozen and decentralized
