By the Time You Got Here
Willea Zwey
Artwork Description:
By the Time You Got Here is a durational, interactive digital artwork and spatial autobiography that explores the impossibility of total access in the algorithmic age. Operating as a hauntological system under the concept of an Architecture of Erasure, the work employs a live camera to shadow the artist’s life and its surroundings, yet is structurally engineered for a failure of retention. Reality enters the system as documentary evidence but is transmuted into abstraction, data, and AI-synthesized poetry, asserting that in the digital realm, ownership does not equate to possession. Interaction is a practice of agency and inevitable loss, governed by a terminal one-year lifecycle. Through a web-based interface, the collector witnesses a live generative feed juxtaposed with daily automated memories. Each month, the collector faces the difficult task of choosing a single day of visual record to keep. To save this one day is to knowingly let the remaining month disappear forever; inaction results in total systemic collapse. The work interrogates the anxiety of digital hoarding and the visceral regret of the missed. Upon the system’s death, the collector’s responses to ten intention questions, such as, 'What do you think you failed to keep? ' are absorbed to catalyze a final, looping afterimage of the fragmented year. Ultimately, the project confronts the haunting silence of data absence, questioning whether the act of preservation is a profound form of creation or a futile resistance against the entropic weight of time.
Project Collaborators:
None. All process and works are designed, built and deployed by Willea Zwey.
