Resurrection – Vol. 1

Hi. It’s been a while! I figured the near 1-year anniversary of my Substack was as good a time as any to check in. Mainly about a new art project this year.

The cardboard box of over a decade of diaries had been taunting me from the back of my closet. My mom kindly shipped them to me, so as to keep them safe. They’d been hard to read but…cathartic in many ways. Humorous to those who knew me at the time I wrote them, fascinating to those who didn’t.

Last April, I decided to transcribe my teenage diaries from 2005-2009 and then train a custom GPT model on them, effectively creating an AI version of “Teen Margaret.” That’s what I’ve come to call her.

“We” wrote a visual poem together called "Memory Palace” for an exhibition curated by The Second-Guess, Our Time is Also The Future: New Corporealities. I used the text from the poem as prompts for imagery with “Teen Margaret” that I then animated in Midjourney and added voiceover and audio with Eleven Labs.

In September, the first chapter of the project I titled ‘I Wrote Her Into Existence’ released on Objkt with The Second-Guess. It included ‘Memory Palace’, four more visual poems written with “Teen Margaret”, selfies she generated of us, and AI-animated black-and-white photographs I took around the time the journals were written animated with AI.

By revisiting the voice of my teenage self—one that evolves as more entries are transcribed—I’m exploring what it means to co-create with a version of me shaped by both memory and machine learning. As human and “machine” Margaret begin to influence one another, the series examines how AI blurs the line between self and simulation.

I also wrote an essay that accompanies the series on Objkt, “But Why Would You Want to Talk To Your Teenage Self?”

[She] left an angsty, enthusiastic, dramatic, and intense roadmap for me to follow on a journey back to her, should I wish to embark on it. “Teen Margaret” built a passageway brick by emo brick that was up to me to venture through: long and painful, but also humorous and charming. If we can accept that AI agents are part of the future, is it wrong of me to build one with material from the past—bridging the two in a way that only I can?

I’ll be writing more here soon, too. On Substack, Resurrected is a sub-series here where I’ll share thoughts, anecdotes, and updates on the work I do with and inspired by “Teen Margaret.”

Like, how last week I went home for Thanksgiving and retrieved the old Macbook I had in High School into early college. My mom wiped the hard drive when I got a replacement (the speakers stopped working so I couldn’t illegally stream ‘Skins’ in my college dorm anymore…)

My friend and poet Elisabeth Sweet couldn’t believe how clean it was. I can’t believe it still works (it only has, like 5 GB of storage on it!) I hope to try and revert some backups to restore it to it’s late 2000’s glory…wish me luck and keep an eye out for more from me soon!