Tezos

Photobooth

Creator

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Description

In 2007, Margaret Murphy began capturing herself with Photobooth on her family’s Mac, and later on her first MacBook laptop. The camera interface included early face filters and effects, allowing personal expression to become a pastime for millennial teens like Murphy. Eventually replaced by the iPhone’s front-facing camera, these low-resolution selfies now stand as vivid cultural markers. Margaret Murphy’s ongoing project I Wrote Her Into Existence reflects on the past and present through AI and personal archives. In the series, Murphy works with a GPT model trained on her teenage diaries. "Teen Margaret," as she calls her, is programmed to emulate her adolescent self in conversation. Murphy journaled regularly from age five to eighteen, filling countless diaries that her parents preserved. She views these writings, alongside her photographic archive and early 2000s digital footprint, as both artifacts and portals for questioning identity, authorship, memory, and what it means to be human in the age of AI. By revisiting the voice of her teenage self—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 influence one another, the series examines how AI blurs the line between self and simulation. The works range from videos generated from collaborative poems between Murphy and "Teen Margaret"—combining AI text, visuals, and voiceover—to morphed selfies and AI-animated renditions of Murphy’s early black-and-white photographs. In a time when online selves feel increasingly artificial, Murphy suggests that future self-representation may emerge not through curation, but through collaboration with earlier versions of ourselves we thought we had left behind.

Traits

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