Interactive Installation on Affective Archives and Algorithmic Fictions
By Líria Varne : :
Small Laboratory for Recreating Humans is an immersive installation that explores the intersection between memory, identity, and technology. The work emerges from a chance encounter with a photograph of a baby forgotten inside a used book bought from a second-hand shop — a real fragment of another person’s life that becomes the starting point for a process of fabulation and memory reconstruction.
Inspired by the concept of the cabinet of curiosities, the work combines analogue archival materials with digital images and sounds, intertwining them with real narratives and others fabricated with the aid of artificial intelligence — a dialogue between the human and the machine that questions authorship, truth, and permanence.
It is a space where the analogue and the digital converge, blending objects, sounds, and images to create a territory of fabulation and reflection. Moving images are projected through videomapping onto modular structures made of cardboard boxes, totalling eleven video projections. Sound operates as an independent yet interrelated narrative and sensorial layer: four FM radio frequencies broadcast distinct compositions, requiring the visitor to manually tune a small radio to listen. This symbolic gesture transforms listening into an act of attention and discovery, where each frequency reveals a different dimension of the work — memories, body, objects, and time.
The exhibited objects are catalogued in a subjective manner, opening space for the public to build their own narratives and affective relations. Participation extends to the invitation to record memories — a gesture of sharing that continues the process of collective construction. Amid an algorithmic society increasingly on the verge of being governed by artificial intelligence, the installation questions how memory is constructed, archived, and reinterpreted by both automated and human processes. The experience invites discovery, doubt, and invention. Between archive and fabulation, between machine and affect, Small Laboratory for Recreating Humans is an exercise in reconstructing memory — an attempt to understand what it means to exist and to remember in a world ever more mediated by algorithms
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