Kika Nicolela's SCRAPS series continues the artist's ongoing examination of memory: over a decade ago, she began working with family films and images, both found footage and her personal archive. Nicolela has always been fascinated by the function that archival images play in the development of our memories and identities. Her mother's Alzheimer's disease has most recently influenced her study.

Nicolela fed an AI her personal archive of family photos and children's drawings for the series. The AI interpreted and blended multiple supplied images and then Nicolela mixed many of the outputs to create the series' multi-layered digital collages.

The resulting works retain a sense of nostalgia, facing fragments of personal memories charged with emotion, pieces of fictional lives and stories upon which the viewers project their own feelings and reminiscences. Both poetic and poignant, SCRAPS reminds us of how our memories are profoundly imperfect and vulnerable machines.

SCRAPS is part of the exhibition RECOLLECTION. AI AND MEMORY presented by EXPANDED.ART in collaboration with The NFT Gallery at their galleries in New York and London, 11 April – 13 May 2023.



19 artists explore the idea of further challenging the concreteness of human memory — personal or collective — through creative collaboration with AI.