Synthetic Memories

Residency

MEE, Erfgoed Gelderland

Period

May to October 2026

About the project

Synthetic Memories is a research archive and eleven experiments about how archives remember.

During my MEE residency I worked with photos from two archives in Nijmegen: the Regionaal Archief, the city’s archive, and the Lesbisch Archief, kept by the community itself. Where both hold the same street, the city describes where the camera stood, and the community describes who was there.

The experiments follow three questions. What happens to a photo when it becomes a file? Halftone, Residue, In-between, Proposed Space and Imprint show how printing, compression, scaling and 3D guessing add things that were never in the photo, or quietly throw them away. Does the archive remember the way we do? Recall Loop copies one photo the way an image bank does, until after about 300 copies only the pattern of the copying is left. Who decides how the past is described, ordered and found? Parallel Record, Same Place, Atlas, Null and N+1 set the descriptions of both archives side by side, and show how a search, a tag or an empty result decides what can be seen.

Three of the experiments became screen works. N+1 and Atlas stand side by side on upright 55 inch screens: a photo that starts unreadable and gets its descriptions back one at a time, next to a cloud of about 3,200 photos from both archives that you can fly through. Same Place puts Hertogstraat and Valkhof on two screens, the city’s views of buildings next to the community’s record of who was there.

Everything is held together by an open research archive that I designed and built for the residency: a network of 45 notes, readings and experiments, linked the way the thinking went. Every experiment has its own note, with what you see, why I made it and what I found, and every experiment can be run in the browser.

Nothing comes back from the past unchanged. The thinking draws on Derrida, Foucault, Benjamin and Warburg, on reconsolidation theory and on Cécile Malaspina’s epistemology of noise.

Enter the archive

Fig. 1N+1 and Atlas on two upright 55 inch screens: a photo that gets its descriptions back one at a time, next to a cloud of 3,200 archive photos.

Fig. 2Same Place on two screens: for Hertogstraat and Valkhof, the photos and descriptions of both archives side by side.

Fig. 3The research archive: a network of notes, readings and experiments, with the note of Same Place open.

Fig. 401 Halftone: a photo printed as dots and scanned again, with a pattern where the two grids meet that was never in the photo.

Fig. 502 Residue: a photo saved as JPEG at falling quality, with everything the file threw away in red.

Fig. 603 In-between: a thumbnail of 32 by 32 pixels made big; only the dots were measured, the rest is guessed.

Fig. 704 Proposed Space: one photo lifted into 3D by a simple rule, where walking around it shows the guessing.

Fig. 805 Imprint: every photo of one place pressed into a single slab, oldest first, like sediment.

Fig. 906 Recall Loop: one photo copied over and over until only the pattern of the copying is left.

Fig. 1007 Parallel Record: four descriptions of one photo side by side; the photo is only as sharp as its description is long.

Fig. 1108 Same Place: Van Welderenstraat in both archives; the city sees a street, the community sees an address.

Fig. 1209 Atlas: all photos of both archives ordered from grey to colourful, where the two archives split almost completely.

Fig. 1310 Null: a search over both archives, where an empty result can mean not there, or there but no word leads to it.

Fig. 1411 N+1: a photo that starts unreadable and is given back one way of describing at a time, but never completely.

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