There is no beginning or end for this project. A snapshot in time, focusing strictly on that which is irrelevant.

A piece of writing advice I got few months ago from a friend was to never look up in the page when you write, to not be the author and editor at the same time. In todays world, our digital and real life existence tends to overlap, in some cases to an extreme extent. The polished, curatorial nature of the internet and social platforms often bleeds into our day to day lives, blurring the lines between the individual and their representation. A feedback loop where the digital image of ourselves is both something we create, and simultaneously creates us. Something that was once a medium for sharing glimpses of our existence now plays an equally important role in defining how we exist.

Model collapse, or data collapse is a term used by AI developers to describe a process where AI-generated content gets scraped back into training data, compromising the legitimacy and quality of subsequent models. What we’re experiencing now is a sort of model collapse of its own. Our physical presence, the decisions we make, things we say, do, or create get averaged out by the inherent need to curate them. We feel constantly visible, therefore we turn into editors of our life before we’re done with our role as its authors. Constantly scanning back and forth through the page, looking for any inconsistencies, polishing that what is already done, instead of engaging in what’s in front of us. More often than not, the voice of reason and objectivity, our inner curator, becomes louder than the voice of ourselves.

For this project I wanted to see what happens when you disengage from this voice entirely, what happens when you allow yourself to engage with the most instinctive and uncurated part of yourself. Without questioning, biases, fears, or reasoning – without looking up the page. For a few months I was carrying a pen and a piece of paper with me everywhere I go, noting down any thoughts I would have that I wouldn’t feel like saying out loud. What came from this was both expected and confronting – nothing special. The notes themselves, together or separately did not say much, not with coherence at least. Nevertheless, the process itself acted as a sort of exposure therapy, a practice in disengaging from your inner curator in the name of making something pure. There was a lot of extraordinary events and ideas across a lot of different places that occurred over the course of these few months. The index itself, however, captures only that which was not: the boring, the plain, the cringe, the stupid, the uninspired, the self-conscious, and whatever else. The blank parts in between these entries are where the most engaging stuff would occur, yet they’re blank.

In the process of noting things down and trying to make sense of everything, I built an html page which was basically a one-ended chat that stores text entries with their date and time, and accidentally ended up using it to interview myself. Two voices, same person. One fishing things out, the other asking whether any of it was worth the effort. It turned out to be an exact reproduction of the dynamic the project was trying to escape: the author and the editor, sharing a page. There is no resolution to that. There is no beginning or end to this project either.