The Entire History of You was an experiment in exploring unlived lives, some form of a life-browser - how do the choices we make change the way our life unfolds? Is there a way that could be reflected back more viscerally?

I wanted a system that understood what I was about, my history and my choices, that understood the turns my life had taken so far, and what was driving me forward. Maybe it needed to know more about me than I consciously knew about myself. And to be believable, it would have to approximate my voice in the way it was played back to me.

How do you explain who you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re headed? At the time I was using Instagram fairly prolifically, as a way to bookmark everything I loved or found interesting in the physical world. It made sense as a starting point for training data, and then I created a series of custom GPTs to fill in the gaps and develop a complete understanding of my life story and forms of expression.

I started to generate alternate lives, creating a fork in the present and leading me into unexpected futures - and watching them play out in the form of generated photographs from now until the moments of all my hypothesized deaths.