Memory Palace

Memory Palace is the first video in Margaret Murphy’s ongoing project “I Wrote Her Into Existence”, a collaboration with a GPT model trained on her teenage diaries. Using over a decade of handwritten notebooks, Murphy created “Teen Margaret,” an AI agent based on her adolescent self. The one-minute video combines AI-generated text, visuals, and voiceover in a spoken word poem shaped by Murphy’s engagement with the model—a glimpse into her evolving dialogue with the past through her personal archive.

Murphy, who journaled regularly from age five to eighteen, views her diaries not just as personal artifacts but as time-traveling portals and “cringe” exposure therapy to question notions of identity, authorship, and the human experience. By revisiting her 14-year-old voice, one that evolves as more entries are transcribed, Murphy explores what it means to co-create with a version of herself shaped by both memory and machine learning. As human and “machine” Margaret begin to impact one another, Memory Palace looks at how digital tools can blur the line between self and simulation, to society’s benefit or detriment.

The work connects to broader conversations around female adolescence, digital identity, cyberfeminism, and embodiment. In a time when online selves feel increasingly artificial, Murphy suggests that future self-representation may come not from control or curation, but from collaboration with previous versions of ourselves we’d left behind.