Digital Ghosts

They say that one dies twice: first when you stop breathing, and then when you are remembered for the last time. Someone who is never forgotten becomes immortal. Would we be immortal if machines remembered us? Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we would be in animated suspension, not quite alive but not quite dead either.

Distributed across millions of hard drives in the hundreds of data centers that make up what we call The Cloud, there is a portrait of each of us. It is made up of cookies, biometric data, sociodemographic catalogs, and recommendation algorithm profiles.

Digital Ghosts invites us to reflect on the ubiquity of surveillance technologies that drive our modern environment of smart devices and social networks. The installation constantly monitors, analyzes, segments, and memorizes its audience. It keeps them in its memory to periodically reanimate them, superimposing them on images of the present moment.

The installation is developed as a structural column supporting a domestic security camera, a monitor, and the necessary support equipment.

The feed generated by the camera is continuously analyzed by an AI algorithm that detects human figures.

When the presence of people is detected, it begins to record a video that includes the detected region and an overlaid timestamp.

Periodically, the system chooses random recordings which it plays over the camera feed.

Selected to participate in the 2025 edition of esto.es_ art festival.