People sometimes say that a computer is like a brain. It isn’t. — Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard

Forgetting isn’t a failure of memory; it’s a consequence of processes that allow our brains to prioritize information that helps us navigate and make sense of the world. — Why Do We Remember?, Dr. Charan Ranganath

Through my devices, I can seemingly remember, or at least call to memory, an endless amount of things. But what have I lost in this promise of endless and expansive remembering? 

Personal computers are designed to extend and expand human capabilities, but in turn, they have drastically changed the way our memories work. Our digital memories are now mediated through our devices, held elsewhere, in secured and cooling data centers. And when we wish to recall them, they speed across fiber optic cables when we call. 

It is relatively inexpensive to generate and save to our seemingly bottomless personal archives. And more often than not, we save too many, rarely deleting the excess. Our devices do not auto prioritize and space save the way our human memories do. When I am in pain, when I panic and when time passes, my human memories fade, consolidate, and sometimes never record at all. All to protect me, to help me move on, to take what I need and throw away what I do not. The files on my cloud storage stay, they are virtually solidified, and are consistently backed up and held for me. My ever growing collection of cloud files, my externalized memory, has become too large and unwieldy to be useful to me. But of course, as long as I continue to store my memories elsewhere, it is useful to others — often being used, analysed, and sold in pieces, as data points. 

So I have decided I want my computer to forget, to delete, like I do. I want to move on. In this series of work, I utilize my personal digital archive to explore the relationship between my human and digital memories –  digital memory as a prosthetic extension of my human memory. www.blairs.computer is a website that asks visitors of the site to take and hold onto my files, so that I can delete them from my drive. Archive of Digital Portraits Cast in Concrete is an ongoing series of sculptures made of discarded personal computing devices from myself and people in my life. These sculptures are cast in concrete, making the data permanently inaccessible.

Both series engage with and examine my and others’ relationships with technology as both dependent, yet critical. They engage with, and activate, my anxiety around trying to remember and trying to hold unto things, but failing to.  

While artist Cécile B. Evan states that “we can no longer distinguish between the so-called real and the virtual,” in this exhibition, I have attempted to articulate the porous boundaries between my very human memory and my extended digital memory.