I came across the website Petittube, which randomly displays YouTube videos with little to no views. Captivated by this unseen footage — old family archives, accidental uploads, strange forgotten footage, and everything in between — I found myself thinking about the ways memories are stored, scattered, and ultimately left behind.

We live in an era of relentless documentation. To house it, data centers rise inside residential grids, quietly diverting water, energy, and land toward supporting our swelling archives. But when the people attached to those files are gone, what follows? Most records remain unvisited — not destroyed, just indefinitely present.

This paradox fascinates me: the invisible but immortal archive. Unlike analog film rolls that fade, these files can persist not because of their value, but because perhaps deletion costs more than retention.

We also cannot forget that storage costs money. Our documentation habits are already stratified by income; who can pay for larger plans, redundant backups, or “unlimited” tiers. And the alternative, self-hosting, demands skills, maintenance, and hours many don't have. And I can't help but wonder if the very retention of this unvisited, forgetten data surpresses the making of new records. That is, through the rapid engrossement of major data storing coorporations, will the communities that fall victim to their expansions be pushed into conditions where documenting daily life becomes emotionally harder? By this logic, we are headed towards the quiet narrowing of who gets to record and preserve: and the more we keep everything, the more unevenly we decide who can keep anything at all.

What if these unviewed and forgotten videos could deteriorate over time, and eroded like the memories we keep in our psyches? What would they look like years after their creators have passed? I run the videos through a stable diffusion model I trained based on corrupted video files and dithering algorithms. This process physically alters and destabilizes the pixels from the original footage. The algorithm recalculates every component — faces, hands, gestures, everyday objects — transforming them into blurred, half-remembered, or perhaps completely reimagined fragments. I try to replicate the way my own memories deteriorate over time: faces lose clarity, details slip away, moments are pushed towards abstraction.

If you are interested in featuring or installing any of these works, or simply have questions, please reach out to me directly → magda@magdagourinchas.com