Tianyi Sun

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

"Memory is not storage, but regeneration: the continual recreation of the past in the present." Wendy Hui Kyong Chun But what happens to memory when the past is compressed within systems built to optimize the present and predict the future? Does memory survive as document, query, or fiction? I am interested in the re-creation of embodied experience and its inevitable failure. Working across sculpture, film, software, and performance, I trace how memory and time are preserved or fabricated within architectures shaped by technology, culture, and value, positioning computational infrastructures and cultural traditions as parallel networks of power. Archival systems, generative algorithms, and mold processes compress and distort what they attempt to hold, but perhaps also console and restore. In my current work, I have been exploring the systems and apparatus of filmmaking as a metaphor for how data and contemporary experience are produced, captured, edited, and queried. My ongoing project BADWIZARD restages the noise between what is lived and the data systems that claim to preserve it, where accounts of truth that are diasporic, precarious, or unofficial are authorized or erased, returning as an inherently failed retelling.

Artwork