A walk-in archive in which artificial intelligence, drawers and printed fragments turn biography into a field of probabilities.
Archives of Possible Lives is an artistic research project exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence, biography and social imagination. It does not collect the past. It collects the potential: alternative biographies, missed opportunities, divergences and courageous decisions that could have been.
The work asks how artificial intelligence changes our relationship to reality. AI describes the world not through truths, but through probabilities. It calculates what is likely, plausible or statistically coherent. In the installation, this shift becomes physical: visitors move through an archive of drawers and receive fragments of a possible life.
Each possible vita is neither true nor false. It is a walk-in hypothesis about identity.
From drawer to drawer
At the entrance, visitors enter an alias and a language at a kiosk terminal. A personalized start card is printed: “Person A — begin at Drawer 32.” From there, the installation guides each visitor through a sequence of up to eight drawers.
Every opened drawer triggers a thermal printer. It produces a poetic biographical sentence fragment and points to the next drawer. The collected printouts form a fragmentary, personal narrative: a possible life that was never lived, but remains conceivable.
At the end, visitors take a final card from a deep card index box. It reads: “The truth is within you.” While the archive overflows with possible lives, this last sentence points to the only place where certainty remains.
From truth to probability
The installation approaches artificial intelligence not as a tool, but as a medium. It translates abstract processes of probability calculation into a physical and sensory experience. Identity appears not as a fixed biography, but as a space of variants.
A language model can adapt fragments to different languages and cultural contexts. It can refer to local places, everyday routines, social norms and narrative structures without naming them as explanation. The result is a set of plausible variations within a contextual field.
In this way, the archive becomes an artistic experiment, a social laboratory and a reflection on how algorithms help write the biographies of tomorrow.
