Skinfolk, Kinfolk

Skinfolk, Kinfolk is a melancholic meditation of mapping and meandering through my mother’s linear years. Conversing with her private histories, memories and experiences through the inanimate – the stories which were never told while growing up, but muttered and pieced together through the family archive. The project allows me to access my feelings through abstraction, explore my relationships with the women in my family and to understand the spectrum of differences of intergenerational traditions.

Through the archive, I visit the places that are distant memories to fill the gulf through the process of fragmentation. Through machine learning, the results are temporal sprawling of frames that reimagine blurred realities. The learned imagery dives deep into the subconsciousness and consciousness to tackle the notions of inherited identities and symbolic familial connections.

In Andreas Huyssen’s discussion of the memory, he suggests that “the fault line between mythic past and real past is not always that easy to draw”. Through the learned regularities and patterns of input data, the computed works are wedged between a mythic past and real past, existing in a liminal state.

The 4-channel installation simulates a conversation, drawing connections from The Contemporary Condition, questioning the concept of temporality. How we can investigate past and present relationships with “hard” and “soft” data, and the role of computational technologies to make meaning from it.  

With Skinfolk, Kinfolk, I hope to uncover an understanding of my identity as my mother’s daughter, and how I relate to that as a growing woman of my time