Megan Paetzhold

United States

Series: Random Access Memories

Using my personal archive of family photos as a point of departure, Random Access Memories sits at the intersection of memory, photography, and technology. Photographs have never been perfect translations of moments. The first iterations were skteched by light and revealed through a chemical process. Digital media requires an additional layer of translation, resulting in two images: the machine legible (a file of numbers and symbols) and the image that more closely reflects reality. Unlike film, a digital image has no original. The file information can be opened up and reconstructed. These added layers make digital photography the most fragile iteration of the medium, and most similar to our own process of making and keeping memories.
My interest with this body of work rests on the malleability of our memories and the fragile ways we keep them. To explore this, I digitized my family’s archive and disrupt the translation of those memories by meticulously editing the code and breaking down the structure of the digital file until it becomes incoherent to both machine and human, becoming more volatile with each translation of the file.