A Life Passed By

“A Life Passed By” is an AI-driven meditation on memory, identity, and loss, built from a personal family archive spanning decades of life in Eastern Europe and hundreds of scanned negatives. Using digitized 35mm and 8mm footage captured by the artist’s grandparents in the 1960s and 70s, Tau trains custom generative models to reconstruct fragments of a fading past. The project is a tribute to the artist’s grandmother, whose experience of dementia reshaped memory into something fluid and uncertain. Glitches, visual gaps, and imperfect reconstructions become metaphors for forgetting as both loss and transformation, and living in between recollection and reality. Positioned between preservation and reimagination, the piece reflects on how technologies of generation do not simply document history but reinterpret it, offering emotional approximations of lives once lived.