A sequence of pieces going back through time exploring lineage, ancestors, history, memory, remembrance, and loss.

It begins in the present day with me, as one piece in a portrait series spanning three generations of women in my family.

1. "Me / 2020"

2. "Mother / 1994"

3. "Grandmother / Before I Even Was on This Earth"

4. "49 Days". When we arrive at my grandmother, we see her recent journey to the afterlife in the video piece <a href="https://www.altsalt.com/movie/49-days/1">49 Days</a>.

5. "The Time Before-" 

The last piece in the series, a generation from a neural network of a Chinese papercut, represents the imperfection of memory & dissolution of generational history, as time inexorably marches on 

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.

Generations

A woman with her eyes closed and a contemplative expression

A spectacled woman holding a baby; they are both laughing and happy

A woman's bust from behind, with a tattoo on her upper back

Everyone

United States

Slice of Life

Asian American

The Life is a Freestyle Quaranzine

Free

Resonate

Nickm.com

Bad Quarto

I'm a poet and professor, and also work as a curator, editor, and publisher, for instance: Curator of the Generative Unfoldings exhibit, editor of the book series Using Electricity by the nonprofit press Counterpath, and proprietor of Bad Quarto, a micropress. My work in all of these roles aims to include diverse voices and perspectives by those who are using computational and verbal arts in new ways.

Envisioning an alternative world

Generations

Creators