REMEMBERING THE FUTURE

Remembering the Future is an ongoing transdisciplinary project examining how stories shapeshift across time—and how the boundary between fiction and reality becomes increasingly unstable under technological pressure. Initiated during fieldwork as an embedded artist and crew journalist at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, the project approaches fiction not as escape but as method: one of humanity’s earliest tools for modeling uncertainty, loss, and possible futures.

Working across photography, collage, lenticular overlays, generative AI, writing, and installation, the project constructs layered visual systems in which past, present, and speculative futures coexist. Images operate less as documents than as temporal objects—sites where evidence is partial and meaning must be assembled rather than observed. Time is treated not as a neutral backdrop, but as something actively shaped through mediation, measurement, and storytelling.

Central to the project is Inez, a speculative, embodied AI developed using a humanoid robotic doll created by Realbotix. Originally designed as an intimate companion product, the figure is recontextualized through narrative and image-making to examine how care, identity, and personhood are increasingly mediated by artificial systems. Rendered through portraiture, collage, and installation, Inez functions not as a singular character but as a mutable framework—an interface through which questions of memory, authorship, and futurity are staged.

Across Remembering the Future, embodied AI is approached as an emerging form of mass media—one that carries cultural values, economic structures, and narrative authority into the realm of intimacy and care. The work asks how stories operate once distinctions between human and machine, fact and fiction, and memory and projection begin to blur. In this recursive space, images, narratives, and selves continually rewrite one another.