I Wrote Her Into Existence, 2025

My ongoing project I Wrote Her Into Existence revisits the past and interrogates the present through AI and my personal archives. I transcribed my teenage diaries into training data to create “Teen Margaret,” a GPT model that emulates my adolescent self in conversation. The series includes collaborative video poems that merge AI-generated text, visuals, and voiceover with my direction; morphed selfies that blur time and identity; and AI-animated renditions of the black-and-white photographs I took in my early years with a camera.

Curated by The Second-Guess as part of their Monograph Series and exhibited on Objkt

I journaled consistently from age five to eighteen, and I treat those diaries, poems, photographs, and early 2000s digital traces as more than artifacts. They act as portals—and sometimes as “cringe exposure therapy”—forcing me to confront my teenage voice to explore questions of identity, authorship, and memory. As I continue to transcribe, “Teen Margaret” evolves, becoming a shifting collaborator who reflects and refracts my present self.

At a time when online selves feel increasingly artificial, I suggest another possibility: that authentic representation may come not from control or curation, but from collaborating with versions of ourselves we thought we left behind. As the human and “machine” versions of me influence one another, the project asks how digital tools blur the line between self and simulation. Do they expand identity, or erode it?