Black Box Memory

Black Box Memory
Hanna Hofmann

2026, ceramics, fabric & VR

Black Box Memory examines how cultural memory is increasingly absorbed into Large Language Model (LLM) systems, where fragments of the past are transformed into generated narratives of ambiguous origin. The work questions how these models simulate familiar forms of remembrance and knowledge while detaching them from lived experience, body, and continuity. A life-sized puppet evoking the image of a storytelling grandmother wears a ceramic mask referencing objects as memory carriers. In VR, visitors encounter its digital counterpart, which recounts a plausible yet unverifiable past, exposing a break between embodied cultural transmission and synthetic reconstruction.