Summer Diary (#2nd trim.)

Winner of the CIFRA Award 2025 (category: Speculative Agency Award)

An AI agent double takes over my phone’s camera roll. Not the polished shots meant for the world, but the quiet, accidental ones, meaningful only to the author. With no input from me, it stitches these fragments into longer moving sequences, adding its own captions and weaving an entirely new storyline.

This agent doesn’t document reality. It speculates, invents, and misremembers. It becomes my stand-in on social media, posting into the void for algorithms instead of people. In this imagined future, humans no longer curate their own personas online. The feed becomes the domain of synthetic proxies, trained on our leftovers, while we reclaim the time and mental space once spent polishing our digital selves.

By embracing misinterpretation and the unpredictability of its co-authorship, the piece asks what happens when we surrender our narrative to a machine that can’t truly know us. This synthetic double becomes a metaphor for the social media persona we already perform today, a version of ourselves living a parallel life, polished and filtered, yet detached from what actually matters. Could the path to staying human in a burning world be to step away entirely, leaving the endless performance to our synthetic counterparts, and finally live uncurated lives?

The AI agent operates autonomously, publishing its speculative narratives to the Instagram account @noncuratedhuman. Each post appears without my approval or intervention, turning the feed into an evolving record of its imagined version of my life.