The Time Before—

The Time Before— is a series about collective ancestral memory. It is an AI-generated artwork-- the result of training a neural network on all the internet-archived images of chinese papercuts that I could scrape together. This artistic process echoes my personal struggle in archiving my family's cultural past.

What is recorded and what is lost?

The Time Before— represents the imperfection of collective memory as generations pass, and as time inexorably marches on.

This is part of a larger 5-piece series about ancestry called Generations.

I've been thinking about memory, history that is relayed and recounted by family members through the foggy lens peering through generations past. And why I use AI in my work... As an artist using AI, you experience an extreme loss of control when you put several hundred ""representative"" images of a subject or theme into a neural network.

The process often goes like: You put in what fragments of an idea or theme you can scrape together, something unexpected always comes out of the machine, and you try to piece it all together. Sometimes it makes sense, often it doesn't.

It's a similar feeling to when you're grasping for a stable story about generations past, and you're left with a feeling of loss and unrecoverable truth.

Exhibited onsite at:

• Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 2023.

• Gallery Obrist Essen in Essen, Germany, 2022.

• Spazju Kreattiv in Valletta, Malta, 2022.

• Artists of Color Expo and Symposium in Seattle, WA, 2022.

• Science Gallery Detroit / Michigan State University, in the Tracked & Traced exhibition, 2021.

Exhibited online at:

• AltSalt's Alternative Worlds Andean and Asian American digital collection, 2021.