The diptych "Kira" is part of my ongoing project Past Lives, which imagines lives through AI-generated portraiture and speculative narrative. Like earlier series such as Artificial Childhood Memories and Artificial Self Portraits, this project uses generative tools not simply to fabricate images, but to explore how memory is made, revised, and sometimes wholly invented. My practice frequently asks: what happens when we outsource remembrance to machines? Can a fabricated memory still be emotionally true?

In Kira, I introduce a fictional subject named Kira Moxley, depicted at age 15 and again at 45. The teenage Kira stands in a toy shop drenched in fluorescent pink - an oversaturated vision of 1990s girlhood. She wears a band t-shirt that once belonged to her older sister, who died the year before in a car accident, an absence that shapes the rest of her life. This is the year she begins documenting herself: audio diaries on cassette tapes, zines collaged from teen magazines, performances in her bedroom mirror.

Thirty years later, we encounter Kira again, her image weathered by time, her expression quieter but no less alert. She now lives above the vintage store where she works, surrounded by analog relics and forgotten objects. Her ongoing artistic project - an experimental sound series titled Electric Reverie - collages field recordings, fictional memories, and found voices into compositions that blur the boundary between truth and invention.

Past Lives continues my exploration of memory as both construction and distortion. While previous series focused on my own personal and familial archives, Past Lives extends that inquiry outward, asking what it means to care about a person we don’t know, or who never existed at all.

My use of AI is not about illusion, but about evocation. In creating lives like Kira’s, I’m interested in how synthetic images can feel haunted, or even sacred. How a machine’s rendering of a fictional face can still hold a trace of something real.

My approach to image-making is shaped by early training with photographers whose work merges intimacy and inquiry, most notably Nan Goldin, Susan Meiselas, and John Szarkowski. Goldin’s diaristic portraits and radical vulnerability taught me that the personal is political, and that the archive of the self can be a site of resistance. Meiselas’s insistence on context and ethical engagement continues to inform how I frame the power dynamics embedded in representation, even in fictional narratives. And Szarkowski’s critical writings on photography as both window and mirror undergird my fascination with images that reflect inner fictions rather than surface truths. Though I now work primarily with generative media, my foundational belief remains the same: an image can still hold truth, even if it’s entirely made up.

artist: Danielle King | medium: 2688 × 1792 PNG | minted July 31, 2025 for the ‘heads or tails’ exhibition curated by Artie Handz for the Tezos Vending Machine (heads)