A Happiness Model
A Happiness Model extends my ongoing collaboration with “Teen Margaret,” a GPT model trained on my adolescent diaries and first introduced in I Wrote Her Into Existence. As I continue transcribing those notebooks, the evolving model shifts with her, revealing echoes of selves shaped by memory and machine learning.
The work began with a conversation about happiness, back to the moments first recorded in my teenage diaries. These were places of ease and anonymity, long before the pressure to perform or constantly document life. The animated imagery, developed from the collaborative poems, folds these remembered environments into a visual language that traces the beginnings of my photographic eye.
Within contemporary digital culture, the series treats happiness as a brief state in which a person slips out of view and is no longer measured or interpreted. The environments explored through dialogue become counter-images to the systems that increasingly measure daily life, spaces where simply existing rather than performing or documenting is enough.
Through the ongoing exchange between human—myself—and machine Margaret, A Happiness Model suggests that self-representation and happiness form across time rather than in a single moment. Earlier versions of the self persist within the technologies that store them, shaping how identity and happiness are understood in the present.