My Mother is Data (2021 - ) — °˖✧ AHREUM LEE

･:☆:. 。。.:☆:･ My Mother is Data ･:☆:. 。。.:☆:･

My Mother is Data is an ongoing series of works based on my relationship with my estranged mother. Since I was ten years old, I have only contacted my birth mother via email and phone calls. The last news I received about her was in 2014, when my estranged father told me she had died. This news turned out to be a lie. Last year I made a 17-minute video, Memory Palace, which documents my experience verifying that my mother was, in fact, alive - without actually making contact with her. As a companion video to the short “documentary” Memory Palace, I made a live-streaming website that continuously mines and displays, in real-time, Twitter posts that contain the word “Mother,” “Mommy,” and “Mom.”

In the traditional hierarchy of data, information and knowledge, data is the lowest. Data is a fragment—a fraction of something. Data also can be scrubbed. In my personal story, emails and a few phone calls were a fraction of my mother. I collect data and assemble it to build my mother as a memory. It is quite impossible through this process to feel a complete relationship with her, not only because data is fragile but also because online data is often an unreliable source. Daily, we all experience this when we interact with social media. We are overwhelmed with data and construct beliefs and memories out of these fragments, whether they are grounded in objective truth or not.