What happens when AI continues the narratives of our lives?
Archive of Possible Lives (2026) is the first artwork acquired by the IPAI Foundation, a Dieter Schwarz Foundation.
The artistic research project explores the intersection of artificial intelligence, biography and social imagination. Archive of Possible Lives generates biographical fragments that address visitors personally, although the system has no access to their personal history. Its texts speak about childhood, relationships, decisions and the future with an intimacy that can suggest knowledge of the person reading them.
Visitors bring their own experiences to these statements. They recognise familiar tensions, recall situations and establish connections that the system itself cannot know. A text generated without personal knowledge acquires meaning within an individual life.
The work examines this encounter between machine-generated language and human self-understanding. How does an unfamiliar statement come to feel like an account of ourselves? What gives it credibility—and how do we distinguish recognition from the impression of being known?
More about the Archive
Artistic, technological and philosophical background to the work
Read the essay →One Life, Six Fragments
After entering their name, the visitor begins a tour through six drawers. The archive is not connected to the internet and has no access to the visitor’s personal history. The name entered at the beginning is used to address the visitor.
Each drawer produces a new biographical fragment, generated by a local language model. Across the six stations, the texts approach childhood, self-perception, relationships, decisions, another possible life and the future.
Step by step, the visitor collects a personal dossier. The statements can feel intimate, coherent or unexpectedly familiar. Their personal significance emerges as the visitor relates them to memories, experiences and expectations of their own.
The encounter invites recognition, doubt and resistance. Which statements seem to fit? Where does the visitor supply a connection that the text itself leaves open? What makes a generated assertion appear to be personal knowledge?
At the end, visitors take an envelope in which they can carry their printouts. The envelope contains a card. It bears the words: “The truth is within you.” The sentence does not oppose the machine’s narrative with a final certainty. Instead, it opens up a double examination of the concept of truth. AI can generate plausible connections while being factually wrong; it can assert with great confidence what never happened. At the same time, the card redirects the question towards one’s own perception: Which parts of the narrated biography do I recognise as coherent, which as projection – and which as false? Truth appears here neither as mere fact nor as purely inner feeling. It must be negotiated repeatedly within the tension between machine-generated assertion, lived experience and critical self-examination.
What makes a generated statement feel personal?
The Narrative Machine Behind the Archive
The visible order of the drawers conceals a networked system of sensors, thermal printers and a language model that runs locally and autonomously. When a visitor opens a drawer, the system registers the movement, continues the biographical narrative and prints the next fragment on site. The narrative is therefore generated within the material structure of the archive—not in a remote cloud.
From truth to probability
The ordered drawers and their numbers evoke an archive in which information has already been collected, classified and stored. Each drawer, however, delivers a text generated during the visitor’s encounter. The installation gives newly produced language the setting and material form of an archived record.
Printing turns the statement into a document that can be held, collected and taken away. As the fragments accumulate, they form a personal dossier whose significance depends on the visitor’s reading. The work brings the apparent authority of an organised archive into tension with the uncertain relationship between its documents and the life of the person receiving them.
The language model runs locally on a computer within the installation and is connected to sensors, drawers and printers as an autonomous narrative machine. Computation, movement through space and the printed fragment form a single process.
The artist defines the spatial arrangement, the thematic fields and the course of the encounter. Within these conditions, the visitor’s recognition, doubt and interpretation remain open. The installation examines how generated language can acquire personal significance without personal knowledge.