In the Void to Re-member: Algorithmic Archives and the Fragmented Self

If every image I have ever saved contains a fragment of myself;

In how many pieces am I now existing?

Through how many screens do I emerge?

How many images do I need to re-member who I am?

And,

are they representations,

or only the afterimage of what I once wanted to perform, to share, to be?

These questions come from saturation.

They come from living inside an archive that remembers for us.

The photographic archive, once materially finite, intentionally assembled in albums, drawers, shoeboxes; has become automated and predictive.

What used to be made through selection and time, now happens by default:

capture, upload, synchronize, share.

The archive is no longer only a place where memory rests;

it is an infrastructure that acts and extracts,

returning the past as a product.

Memory is no longer reconstruction.

It is delivered:

a notification: “On This Day”.

a slideshow: “Highlights”.


What does a platform want you to remember?

Memories features across platforms function as a uniform landscape of manufactured recollection, designed for users overwhelmed by their own photo accumulation and reassured by the promise that nothing will be lost and that nostalgia will arrive without effort.
In this setting, we become audiences of ourselves, watching algorithms assemble our “best” stories through pre-assembled categories and ranking procedures that look similar across millions of lives.¹Sara Reinis. Manufactured Recollection. Real Life Magazine, 2019.


This shift turns memories into mere mementos.


Remembering becomes reminding.

Platforms conflate attention with positivity; what has been clicked, liked, or widely engaged with, becomes retroactively framed as meaningful. The digital homunculus of memory is based on attention.² M.R. Sauter. Instant Recall. Real Life Magazine, 2017.

These interface mechanisms are not superficial features; they signal a deeper structural transformation. Andrew Hoskins situates this transformation within what he calls the connective turn. Memory has broken out of traditional archival containers and diffused across hyperconnected networks linking brains, bodies, platforms, and infrastructures. The archive no longer resides in a bounded institutional space; it operates as an environment.³Andrew Hoskins, ‘New Memory and the Archive’, in Archives: Power, Truth, and Fiction, eds. A. Prescott and A. Wiggins (Oxford University Press, 2023)

An ecosystem.

Hoskins describes this as an inverted archive: no longer located in place and time. The archive has been turned inside out; it follows us, it consumes us, it remakes us. In this post-scarcity condition, the past no longer fades through material decay but accumulates relentlessly. The paradox of this situation, is that at the same time, the complexity and volume of digital records make it impossible to make sense of, to manage, or to use for memory. The inverted archive can thus be seen as both nowhere and everywhere, both risky and worthless to remembering. 
⁴Andrew Hoskins. The restless past: An introduction to digital media and memory. Digital memory studies: Media pasts in transition (pp. 1–24), Routledge. 2017


The digital personal archive is not only made of photographs.

Screenshots, messages, maps, folders, interfaces, videos;

have become the vernacular images of our lives.


On the other side, the everyday becomes photographable,

and photography becomes a practice of everyday life.



Jess Zimmerman writes about looking at the past through Google Maps and realise that sometimes images can remain, but emotions are gone. The past is here but the connection is lost. Memory has no interior, only facade. ⁵ Jess Zimmerman. A life in Google Maps. Catapult Magazine, 2022.

Storage is a form of forgiveness.


The void is for fiction, and fiction, is a (the) way to re-member.



Memory-making technologies are rocks.



Have you ever kept a stone in a drawer?



And have you ever wondered why?


A stone picked up somewhere, somehow, holds the extraordinary agency of activating a memory. Our first inscriptions, earliest journals, marks of presence, traces of experience; were carved into rocks. I find it a beautiful coincidence that the oldest technology of memory-making is still an object we casually keep at home. Maybe something in us recognizes the materiality of stones as a container of moments, experiences and people.


José van Dijck describes such objects as mediated memories, virtual or non-virtual artifacts that do not store memory in themselves but act as agents in the reconstruction of autobiographical identity. Their value lies not in material worth but in their mnemonic agency.⁶José van Dijck. Mediated memories in the digital age, Stanford University Press, 2007.

A stone in a drawer and a screenshot on a hard drive share this paradoxical condition:

minimal economic value, yet affective charge.

They do not preserve a fixed past;

they participate in its continual reconfiguration.



Today, however, the capacity to store has overflowed. Clouds, servers, and subscription plans promise infinite space: extra square meters for our homes, unlimited room for our images. This produces a false sense of boundless memory-making. In this economy of excess, we preserve things as if they could protect us from fading within the vastness of our own files, yet this very impulse generates the opposite effect.

As if the weight of a rock was capable of anchoring the flux of digital time.


Between home re-collections and cloud infrastructures, between drawers and virtual databases, my research explores what happens when technologies of remembrance collapse into each other: when pixels turn into fossils, when digital residue hardens into 3D-printed stones, when the oldest and newest media of memory coexist on the same desktop surface. When old folders of downloaded images persist as accidental collective and autobiographical archives.

Through these materials, I investigate how pixelated images and corrupted screenshots can function as twenty-first-century relics. This contribution proposes that memory today operates less as recall than as navigation: locating oneself within an ever-expanding, inverted archive. From this perspective, stones and pixels belong to the same lineage of mediated memory, each participating in the construction of autobiographical identity and in the ongoing negotiation between personal and collective forms of remembering.

Memory shifts from static to fluid,

cartographic rather than chronological.

I approach the contemporary personal photographic archive as a knowledge system, one that negotiates identity and authorship under conditions of algorithmic governance, and that increasingly links remembrance to metrics, legibility, and commercial infrastructures.



Drawing from my practice-based research project Silly Archiving: On Backlog, Buffering, and Data Hoarding, I develop speculative methods for recollection: activating dormant folders of downloaded images; testing the limits of granting bots partial agency as curatorial assistants; re-materializing digital residues as 3D-printed “fossils”; and experimenting with reduction, attention, and slowness as gestures of care. The hyphen in re-member is deliberate: it insists on recollection as reassembly, an ongoing practice of composing a self from dispersed digital fragments.




I write as part of a generation that has taken total documentation for granted: a life photographed because it was possible; a life archived by default and backed up automatically.


The question is no longer whether we have memories, but whether we can still locate ourselves inside them. By tracing the transformation from paper to algorithmic album, from drawer to platform, I reimagine the photographic archive not as a site of total preservation, but as a space of attention: one that allows us not only to store images, but occasionally, try to find ourselves in them again.


The transformation of the photographic archive is not merely technological; it is ontological. What is at stake is not only how we store images, but what memory becomes when storage no longer depends on scarcity.

The past does not fade.

It accumulates.


In a scarcity culture, memory was filtered by loss.


In a post-scarcity culture, memory is filtered by algorithms.



Beneath this aesthetic uniformity lies a deeper structural shift. Platforms no longer simply present curated recollections; they participate in determining what counts as memory in the first place. Rather than inviting users to actively select and narrate their pasts, these systems delegate relevance to algorithmic operations governed by popularity metrics, facial recognition, and thematic indexing. Autobiographical form becomes standardized in advance through which personal narrative is preformatted and homogenized. 
⁷Sara Reinis. Manufactured Recollection. Real Life Magazine, 2019. 


As these tools increasingly supplement and reshape memory-making practices, remembrance becomes a site of algorithmic co-authorship.

Photographs are no longer encountered as relatively rare artifacts marking significant events,

but as prosthetic extensions of the self. 


This continuous performance as the logic of recollection: one learns to remember what attracts attention, what invites approval and what carries the potential for circulation and monetization.

If these infrastructures have become embedded in the production of identity itself, what forms of co-creation or resistance remain possible within their logic?

Relevance is not remembered; it is generated.

Contemporary mobile operating systems exemplify this redistribution of mnemonic agency. Within Apple Photos, the “Memories feature” functions not as a passive retrieval tool but as an editorial apparatus. Introduced with iOS 10, it automatically evaluates and represents images as pre-composed audiovisual slideshows. Rather than requiring users to narrate their own pasts, the system assembles probabilistic “event clusters” derived from machine learning models trained to detect faces, objects, scenes, locations, temporal proximity, and aesthetic qualities such as sharpness, exposure, and facial expression.
⁸iOS 10: How to Make memories in the photo app. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEdgjNgrZ2w CNET, 2016
.

Where does the music come from?

Who zooms in and out?

Why this title?

The infrastructural nature of algorithmic memory becomes particularly visible at moments of interface disruption. When Apple redesigned the Photos slideshow function in recent iOS updates, online discussion forums filled with complaints from users who felt that their memories had been altered or degraded. Users described the disappearance of certain transitions, musical pairings, or automated montages as if a personal history had been compromised. The slideshow is no longer perceived as a feature; it is experienced as a mediator of autobiographical medium. When its parameters shift, memory itself appears unsettled.⁹
Reddit, 2025. iOS 18 photo app ruined the slideshow https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1fk6unk/ios_18_photo_app_ruined_the_slideshow/

Under these conditions, remembering shifts from an intentional act to an infrastructural event. The responsibility of selection migrates from subject to system. Users capture endlessly, reassured that meaning will be produced retroactively. If repetition stabilizes identity, then algorithmic resurfacing becomes a choreography of the self. Certain fragments are repeated; others disappear into opacity.

The archive only expands in volume while narrowing in narrative diversity.

Excess produces disorientation.

The archive grows heavier,


while memory grows lighter.


As Molly Soda reflects, “I ❤ info and it’s easier than ever to accumulate it. (…) photos fill up my phone’s camera roll only to show up later in an oddly poetic—sometimes embarrassing—auto-generated iPhone video titled ‘Pet Friends’ or ‘Together.’” The logic of postponement structures this condition. “When everything is saved for later, when do you actually get to it?” Soda asks. Files persist without closure. Past selves coexist with present ones. As she writes, “All of my files (selves) exist together… creating new inflection points.” The past does not settle into distance but remains active, layered, and continuously recombined.
¹⁰Molly Soda Save for later. Substack. https://mollysoda.substack.com/p/save-for-later 2024.

Here, the logic of the inverted archive ¹¹Andrew Hoskins, 2023 New memory and the archive. In A. Prescott & A. Wiggins (Eds.), Archives: Power, truth, and fiction. Oxford University Press. reveals its central paradox: it promises total recall while undermining experiential depth. It stabilizes fragments while destabilizing narrative. It preserves surfaces while thinning interiority. Yet Soda also points toward another possibility: an embrace of the minor and the overlooked. “I’m happy I saved that glitter graphic of a heart-shaped necklace… because they’ve become increasingly harder to find”. What appears trivial may become scarce. What seems disposable may later function as a fragile trace of vernacular culture. The amateur archive: forgotten folders, outdated formats, dormant hard drives, may hold alternative histories that escape algorithmic ranking.


Earlier forms of digital accumulation: downloaded image folders and screenshots; required deliberate acts of saving. Selection was conscious, even if intuitive.

Today, the anxiety has shifted: no longer fear of loss, but fear of excess. 



Images are stored automatically, archived by default, synchronized across devices. Yet saving may still function as a quiet gesture of agency. What escapes algorithmic resurfacing occupies a different temporal space. These dormant files resist optimization. They persist outside visibility metrics. In this sense, archiving what is hidden or displaced by algorithmic prioritization may reintroduce a minor form of curatorial authorship.

If memory is increasingly distributed across infrastructures, 



the question becomes one of agency.



Who curates the past when curation is automated? 



What forms of subjectivity emerge when autobiographical continuity is co-authored by ranking systems? 



What happens to what gets forgotten and comes back?


Grafton Tanner sharpens this diagnosis through the concept of foreverism. We do not live in a culture of nostalgia, but a culture incapable of endings. Datification promotes storage; storage promotes endless availability. To “foreverize” something is not merely to preserve it but to reactivate it perpetually.¹² 
Grafton Tanner. Foreverism, Polity. 2023.

As a multiplier of photography’s influence, algorithmically performed “Memories” bring us deeper into a supercharged aesthetic consumerism that shapes our personal narratives along the lines of influencer culture. Tamara Tenenbaum similarly observes how the influencer register blurs the line between personal narrative and promotional discourse.¹³Tamara Tenenbaum. Un millón de cuartos propios: Ensayo para un tiempo ajeno, Ediciones Paidós. 2025.

The self becomes a character whose coherence sustains visibility. In aspirational image culture, this logic turns inward: one curates oneself in anticipation of future legibility.

The performance precedes the person.

Two years ago I created my finsta (fake-instagram).

I re-member my first digital camera.

Pixelated memories, printed and pushed into an album.

In transition of devices.

Where was the right place to store them?

People project us more like our image rather than ourselves.

Selfhood is a reflection.

A projection.

More than five hard drives containing my life in bits; fragile and disconnected.

Cables lost in boxes.

Not matching.

My phone reminded me that 2 years ago I was run over by a car.

Viviane Maier’s storage room was auctioned in 2007.



Collective internet imaginaries are reproduced and shared. Identities crossing and interchanging. Images are made to be sent and to project, not to re-member anymore.


When I look at photographs of myself from the past, I am often unsure whether I can truly see through them. I do not always recognize myself in these images. What appears instead is a distant reflection of what I once wanted to be, or perhaps what I wanted to capture and share. This dissonance has emerged within contemporary image culture, where the act of photographing no longer means remembrance, but identity construction.




Personal images do not simply document lived experience; they increasingly participate in its construction.

We fail to recognize ourselves in our own photographs because images are shaped by perfomativity. Rather than reflecting who we are, they anticipate how we might be seen. 



This mechanism is exemplified in Excellences & Perfections by Amalia Ulman. A staged Instagram performance in which a carefully fabricated persona was widely interpreted as an authentic self-portrait. Ulman’s work exposes how social media collapses the distinction between lived experience and its aestheticized circulation.¹⁴Amalia Ulman. Excellences & perfections, 2014



Social media is now Content media.

We consume.

We are consumed.



Are these new practices of delegated archival agency to non-human actors

new forms to re-member or just spectacle?



In an era that constantly remembers, I seek to reimagine the archive not as a space of accumulation, but as a space of attention, one that enables not only the storage of images, but the re-membering of the self. This requires developing methods to reconnect with personal memories and to confront their weight rather than merely their volume.

Everything belongs to the future.

Rapid obsolescence of digital technology.

The update culture.

The Digital oblivion.

How many GB do you own?

Are we archiving memories or just accumulating them?

Chaos of excess.


Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity offers a useful metaphor for this condition: a world in which forms no longer solidify, in which continuity dissolves into flow. Memory, identity, and technological infrastructures are caught in constant motion.¹⁵

 Zygmunt Bauman. Liquid Modernity 2000.



Nothing settles; everything circulates.



My life has always been somehow connected to the ‘Cloud’.



How does this influence the way I store my memories?



How does digital culture and the Internet affect the way we perceive identity and memory?



How do we construct our digital memory?



Is there a digital memory? Is it different?



The process of self-construction can be directly related to our Internet persona.




Today, those who are continuously active online generate a permanent, expanding archive of memory and identity. Digital representation does not merely document the self; it participates in constructing a datafied and often fictionalized persona.

My hard drive is filled with files that silently narrate who I was, who I performed, and who I imagined myself to be. An invisible biography accumulates in the background;
stored, duplicated, backed up, yet always at risk of dissolving into digital oblivion.

Perhaps it is not the images we share that reveal us most clearly, but those we discard. The unposted, the unsorted, the forgotten files may carry a different intimacy: fragments that resist performance and remain outside the economy of visibility.




Perhaps it is the blurred photograph, dormant in an old hard-drive folder, that allows me to see most clearly who I once was.


Eva and Franco Mattes have examined the ethical and political implications of digital culture. One of their projects, Ricardo Uncut, debuted on the website of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The work emerged from two central questions: How do we construct digital memory? And does the notion of a “private photo” still exist? Ricardo Uncut began with an open call posted on social media offering $1,000 in exchange for access to an individual’s complete smartphone archive. The selected participant, Ricardo, sold ten years of personal photographs and videos, which the artists edited into a slideshow presented as an unfiltered portrait of his life. When encountering Ricardo Uncut, viewers construct a portrait of a person through the images he produced over a decade. The archive reveals multiple versions of the same individual: professional, intimate, mundane, performative.
¹⁶Eva & Franco Mattes. Riccardo Uncut. Whitney Museum of American Art. 2018


In an era defined by algorithmic memory and data extraction, such gestures resonate. One could imagine a future archive composed of similar slide-based time capsules, documents/videos through which later generations attempt to understand the early decades of social media and its impact on autobiographical construction. Whether these archives would reveal interiority or merely surface remains uncertain.



Digital tools do not simply store memory; they reshape the methods through which memory is produced and accessed. The devices we use (smartphones, laptops, notebooks, stones, etc.) mutate our mnemonic practices.

The medium reorganizes tempo.

It reorganizes attention.

It reorganizes memory.


In my own practice, I have noticed that the most frequent method I use to locate a photograph is not chronological but spatial. I search by geolocation. I remember where something happened before I remember when it happened. My archive unfolds cartographically. Memories are no longer primarily sequenced; they are relationally interconnected.


My past is not a linear timeline but an ecosystem I can navigate.

Time blurs; space persists.

We are built in layers,

and platform architecture intensifies this condition. 


Instagram, for example, produces multiple layers of self-representation. The option to convert a personal profile into a business account signals a structural shift: what once functioned as a space of informal sharing becomes an interface governed by analytics. Views, impressions, reach, and engagement rates become visible and quantifiable. The account holder is subtly compelled to optimize for visibility. Self-representation becomes a performance calibrated toward algorithmic recognition.


Within this ecology,

“feed” operates as exhibition. Permanent, curated, and grid-based, it accumulates into an aesthetic narrative oriented toward long-term legibility. Images are selected not only for personal resonance but for coherence, branding, and professional projection. The feed becomes both portfolio and persona.


“Stories”, by contrast, function within a logic of controlled ephemerality. They disappear after twenty-four hours, yet remain capturable, archivable, and indefinitely preservable through highlights. Their temporality simulates immediacy and intimacy, yet is still fully embedded in metricized systems of attention.


“Close Friends” feature introduces a further stratification of visibility: selective intimacy. Publicness is partitioned into calibrated tiers of access, producing micro-publics within broader infrastructures of exposure. Users address overlapping yet differentiated audiences, distributing aspects of the self across layered fields of visibility.


“finsta”, an alternative or secondary Instagram account, intensifies this stratification even more. Often detached from professional identity and sometimes anonymized and private, it operates as a counter-space within the same infrastructural logic. It may permit informal documentation or expressions that would destabilize the coherence of the primary account’s curated persona.


What emerges is not a unified digital subject but a modular identity assembled across differentiated regimes of visibility. Each layer corresponds to a distinct imagined audience and to a distinct metric logic.

“Feed” is no longer in use and mostly static.


“Stories” circulate and accumulate in “Highlights”.


“Close Friends” may not be close, but they are invited into staged intimacy.


“Finsta” gestures toward an earlier and naive possibility: a space before optimization, before branding, before the self became a metric.


This stratification reshapes autobiographical memory. A life is no longer archived in a single narrative thread but dispersed across parallel representational channels. What is publicly preserved differs from what is privately circulated. What disappears differs from what persists. Visibility settings produce mnemonic hierarchies.

You see yourself through metrics.

You perform yourself through grids.


You fragment yourself through audiences.



In 1995, Sherry Turkle described digital identity as “the sum of [one’s] distributed presence” emerging through windows, simulations, and networked interaction. The computer functioned as both tool and mirror—an interface through which we began to “see ourselves differently”.¹⁷
Sherry Turkle. Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the Internet, Simon & Schuster. 1995
 Yet the multiplicity she identified as exploratory has since hardened into infrastructural segmentation. Today, identity is not merely distributed; it is calibrated, ranked, and formatted within metricized systems of visibility. What once appeared as playful multiplicity now operates as modular optimization.


Professional expectations, particularly within creative fields, intensify this platformed dynamic. For designers, artists, researchers, and cultural workers, social media is not merely a space of self-expression but an infrastructural requirement. Visibility becomes a condition of employability. The profile is operational.

Visibility becomes labor.


The archive becomes résumé.


The persona becomes brand.

Under these conditions, the personal archive does not merely document life; it constructs a sellable self. The feed becomes both narrative and marketing infrastructure. Authenticity turns into an aesthetic strategy. Autobiographical continuity fragments as different audiences encounter different calibrated versions of the same subject. Memory is no longer only retrospective; it is pre-structured by interface design and audience segmentation. Documentation is guided by anticipated visibility.

Memory today is neither purely human nor purely machinic. It emerges through interaction between embodied intention, interface design, algorithmic ranking, and audience response. The archive is co-authored. The challenge, then, is not to retreat to a pre-digital ideal of private memory, nor to reject technological mediation altogether. The challenge is to renegotiate the terms of this co-production.


Re-membering, in this context, becomes a critical gesture.

If platforms optimize for accumulation, re-membering may require attention.

If visibility is rewarded, opacity may become a form of care.

Re-membering is not nostalgia for analog scarcity;