Archival documents become active material.
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Concept
ADAPTIVE ARTIFACTS TRANSFORM ARCHIVES
Adaptive Artifacts (ADAR) is an artistic research project exploring how archives can be re-read through interaction design, generative systems, and ethical forms of translation. Rather than treating the archive as a fixed repository, the project approaches it as an unstable field of fragments, omissions, classifications, and memories.
The interactive zine introduces the conceptual, historical, and technological foundations of the project. Each chapter combines written research with archival documents, software processes, sound, moving images, and interactive elements.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and translation reorganise information.
The processed data is mapped to interactive behaviours and user input.
An ethical framework guides every stage of development.
DRAG NODES · OUTPUT → INPUT TO CONNECT · CLICK A WIRE TO DISCONNECT
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On the disappearance of cultural heritage
WHAT REMAINS WHEN AN ARCHIVE ERASES IDENTITY?
This chapter brings together archival fragments, short essays, moving images, field recordings, and interactive annotations. It explores questions of origin and identity through documents shaped by incomplete, inaccurate, and often unethical systems of representation. Rather than resolving what is missing, the project uses these absences to generate new proposals that activate processes of memory.
Case study: Jean Mettas’s book
Jean Mettas’s book documents French slave-trading expeditions and routes during the eighteenth century:
Répertoire des expéditions négrières françaises au XVIIIe siècle. Tome premier: Nantes
Rather than seeking statistical exhaustiveness, ADAR isolates recurring formulations within the colonial records documented in this book. The project draws attention to the discriminatory language through which colonial archives shaped historical representation. The system reinterprets these numerical traces through real-time audiovisual translation, proposing an ethical reading of the archive from the perspective of descendants of enslaved people.
Critical transition
Disappearance is not simply an absence. It can be produced by systems of classification that preserve numerical records while erasing names, origins, identities, and lived experience.
Open resource
Mettas, J. (1978). Répertoire des expéditions négrières françaises au XVIIIe siècle. Tome premier: Nantes (S. Daget, Ed.). Société française d’histoire d’outre-mer.
Place a quotation, scanned detail, or contextual note here.
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Preservation solutions using technology
TECHNOLOGY DECIDES WHAT BECOMES VISIBLE
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the core technology behind ADAR: Archipelago. By reversing its conventional purpose, the machine becomes the reader, allowing data to assume the role of storyteller. Rather than producing definitive narratives, the system opens new relationships between archival fragments, inviting visitors to construct their own interpretation.
This reflection enters into dialogue with Asma Mhalla’s Cyberpunk: The New Totalitarianism, in which she examines emerging forms of totalitarianism through what she describes as a “fascist simulacrum”, drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum.
"It is characteristic of our era—an era defined by the fragmentation and polarization of identities and ideas."
Maxans — Video experiment:
ADAR Manifesto, Video Essay Pt. 1
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Software environment as memorial
CODE BECOMES A STRUCTURE FOR REMEMBRANCE
This chapter can document the TouchDesigner network, OCR pipeline, translation system, and generative audiovisual output.
archive → OCR → translation → interaction → audiovisual outputScanned pages or archival details.
Documentary fragments.
Audio interviews.
Apple Vision OCR, metadata, and translated text.
Blob tracking.
Motion sensors, Kinect, and LiDAR scans.
Bridging digital processes and physical space.
DRAG NODES · OUTPUT → INPUT TO CONNECT · CLICK A WIRE TO DISCONNECT
ARCHIPELAGO
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Living archives as a creative format
THE ARCHIVE BECOMES AN EVENT
This interactive composition illustrates the relationship between memory and interpretation. Rearrange the words to express your perspective on the project.
memoryfragmentrelation
absencetracevoice
of
05
An ethical framework reversing technology
THE SYSTEM EXPOSES THE VIOLENCE OF CLASSIFICATION
Encoding sensitive archival material within an ethical framework inevitably generates contrasting interpretations. As a descendant of enslaved people, I question documents that reduce enslaved persons to the category “Black” while omitting their origins and identities. This creates a responsibility to examine both the documents and the systems through which this history was recorded, because these classifications continue to shape perceptions of Black histories.
The methods used in ADAR: Archipelago, including data scraping, require a clearly defined ethical framework. To extract numerical information, the text-analysis tool identifies recurring phrases structured as “with,” followed by a number and the word “Blacks.” When removed from its historical and technical context, this line of code risks reproducing discriminatory language or enabling misinterpretation. ADAR therefore makes the extraction process visible and contextualises its use.
“We no longer need to reproduce violence. We need to create conditions in which memory can emerge beyond trauma.”
— Maxans
Open ethical principles
Historical transparency.
Respect for human dignity.
Contextual integrity.
Memory over spectacle.
Intergenerational transmission.
Responsible data use.