A Life Passed By (My Grandmother's Memories)

Ivona Tau

A Life Passed By is a video from the larger project My Grandmother’s Memories, which uses AI to reconstruct the fragmented perception of memory loss. Trained on 8mm films and Soviet-era negatives, it simulates a fading reality—where faces shift, time loops, and truth dissolves, specifically through my grandmother’s experience with Alzheimer’s. Trained on my family’s photographic archives—images taken by my grandfather in Soviet-era Lithuania—AI reimagines the way she perceived the world in her later years, where past and present became indistinguishable.

Alzheimer’s fractured her sense of identity—she mistook her daughter for her sister, relived moments from her childhood as if they were happening in real time, and lost the ability to separate reality from recollection. AI, with its innate tendency to blend concepts and generate fluid, dreamlike reconstructions, mirrors this disintegration. By merging childhood and motherhood, past and present, My Grandmother’s Memories does not simply document history—it simulates the experience of living inside a shifting, unstable mind.

The work challenges the reliability of both human and machine memory. AI does not restore my grandmother’s past but hallucinates it—offering a speculative, imperfect reconstruction that is at once deeply personal and completely artificial. The resulting video is a meditation on loss, perception, and how technology can help us cope with the unknowable inner worlds of those we love.