Promptograph (n.) — From prompt and -graph. A device that sets in motion, reads, and queries a database materialized as a flow.
The Promptograph — Consumerist Autobiography
For fourteen yearsI meticulously kept every one of my receiptSorted chronologically and assembled into a huge reel, they form the film of a life told through consumption.
This reel constitutes the database of the Promptograph. The Promptograph makes the receipts scroll past, like a succession of fragments of life.
Each receipt is a trace of time, place, and action. Their accumulation reveals habits, changes in life, and, more broadly, an interaction with the transformations of society. The mass of paper makes the weight of our consumption tangible, while the mechanical movement of the reel embodies its continuous rhythm.
The quantity of accumulated data exceeds the scale of human perception. Captured, digitized, and interpreted by artificial intelligence, this data can become readable in new ways: the machine explores what human memory cannot encompass.
The viewer can then prompt this archive and interrogate this data-based biography. The Promptograph becomes a machine for scrolling, analyzing, and narrating a life through its traces of consumption and the instructions given to artificial intelligence.
An autobiography without a narrative, in which receipts become memory, data becomes portrait, and scrolling becomes a journey through time.
