DEUTSCH

"The Archive of Possible Lives" is an artistic research project at the intersection of AI, biography, and social imagination. It collects not the past, but the potential: alternative biographies, divergences, missed opportunities, courageous decisions that could have been. Each “possible vita” is a walk-in hypothesis about identity. At the center is an installation that invites visitors to enter their own lives as a vector space: from a few deliberately chosen parameters, an AI generates biographical spaces of possibility. These are presented as concise poetic fragments that are neither true nor false, but statistically plausible. In the form of printed cards, they unfold into narratives that lead step by step through the drawers of the archive. Each printout is a fragment of a possible identity, a scenario that continues to write itself. Visitors thus collect an individual path through the archive, consisting of a sequence of decisions and algorithmic coincidences. At the end is a deep card index box from which each visitor takes a final card. It reads: The truth is within you. While the drawers overflow with printed out "probable" lives, this card points to the only place where certainty remains—one‘s own inner self.

In this way, the work allows us to experience how artificial intelligence is changing our relationship to reality: from certainty to probability, from truth to narrative. "The Archive of Possible Lives" is at once an artistic experiment, a social laboratory, and a reflection on how algorithms are helping to write the biographies of tomorrow.

full portfolio on request

Florian Mehnert Installation View, Florian Mehnert 2025