Artist and designer based in Lincoln, Nebraska and New York City. Trained in design in Milan. Lived and worked in Europe for over a decade before returning to the US. Currently transitioning from a career in interior design and contracting to a full-time art practice.
A fine art and research project treating the physical and digital archive of a single human life — my own — as externalised cognition: a distributed mind, fragmented across decades of artifacts and data, requiring reassembly.
The project draws on Clark and Chalmers' Extended Mind Thesis (1998), which proposes that cognitive processes extend beyond the skull into the environment through tools, objects, and systems that function as part of the mind itself. Under this framework, the preserved artifacts of a life — journals, letters, photographs, email archives, digital traces, AI conversation logs — are not records about a person. They are parts of a mind, scattered across containers and formats.
The archive spans nearly forty years, from childhood drawings and handwritten poems through to the earliest digital traces of the mid-1990s and the full data record of a contemporary life. The subject came of age at the exact inflection point between analogue and digital culture, producing an archive with two distinct registers: the curated physical record, where everything that survives was deliberately kept, and the ambient digital record, where everything is captured unconsciously.
When the artist works with an AI system — holding dozens of conceptual threads simultaneously, cross-referencing artifacts against historical context, surfacing patterns invisible to biological memory — her cognitive capacity is temporarily and genuinely expanded. The insights persist. The tool is part of the mind. The process is part of the work.
The most ambitious element: the organised, contextualised, analysed data is used to build multiple AI-constructed versions of the subject — each from a different period, data set, or interpretive lens. The differences between these constructs become the work. Data tells a version. Memory tells another. So do journals, photographs, institutional records, and AI interpretation. Each system observes a different portion of a life. The differences are not problems. They are the substance of the work.
Mining the full record across two archaeological registers: the intentional physical archive and the unconscious digital record.
Reassembling the distributed mind into a single navigable system.
Context does not explain the artifact — it gives it back its atmosphere.
AI is essential — not as a trend but as the only thing that makes this scale of analysis possible. Its biases and errors become part of the work.
The AI will inevitably get things wrong. That friction is inherent. It is the relationship between any interpretive system and the life it attempts to describe.