Co-creating an Heirloom

For my master’s thesis︎︎︎, this is project began as an attempt to collaborate with my 92-year-old grandmother, recasting the function of an heirloom to embody the process of co-creation across generations and the digital divide.

I grew up not more than 10 minutes away from my grandmother’s house, but I didn’t step foot inside until my twenties. It’s complicated.

Since crossing that threshold, we’ve been purging, clearing pathways, and resurfacing ephemera of decades past.

Read about our exhibition in The Boston Globe︎︎︎

June’s ability to remember is deteriorating, prompting new urgency to piece together the remaining fragments. I found myself filling in the gaps from what I remember, recounting the details of her own lived experiences back to her; a process of transference.

From one day to the next, there would be new versions of her life, filled with improbable timelines and happier endings.

StyleGAN AI generated images trained on old vernacular pictures of the home in which June grew up, The Three Decker

Sometimes the very tools that were supposed to aid in the process of preservation worked against me, other times they revealed new layers.

A butchered audio transcription

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Co-creating an Heirloom