Did I Imagine This {Augmented Memory}

Did I Imagine This (Banks Mill, Derby, 2024) brings printed images, an online space, and wooden sculptural interfaces into an installation-led investigation of AI as augmented memory: a method for re-reading the past until it behaves like a lived experience. The work stages a fictional birthday party as a speculative archive, asking when memory becomes authored, and by whom.

The birthday party existed in my MA as a trope, and in this project it becomes a placeholder event, a method that tests a simple, unsettling proposition, whether fabricated images can pass the threshold into recognition and take on the affective authority of memory.

The exhibition constructed a speculative archive around this invented event. I used original photographs from my childhood as starting points, then allowed the AI software to extrapolate a larger world through random seeding: “AI-generated memories” that arrive as archive ’photos’ or ephemera.

The sculptural elements operated as a housing for this evidence. Frames, voids, enclosures, peepshow-like boxes, and head-like forms, interfaces that promise access while keeping origin out of reach. Two altars, a symbolic kitchen table, and an un-sanctified credence table held work as ritual furniture. Structures that invite offering, and stage the rite of passage implied by birthday and cake. In this sense, the “archive” is not neutral; it is a device that produces belief by arranging fragments into a space that feels consequential.

AI remains present as co-agent, an unstable mnemonic instrument that helps fabricate an affective record. The exhibition asks viewers what it means to encounter a memory with no stable origin, only containers, surfaces, and a persuasive atmosphere. The work offers recognition as an event in itself, both brief and intimate, perhaps difficult to place.