Bearing Weight: Memory, Data, and the Practice of Remembrance – Commit to Memory, Know It Will Perish

Abstract

In Bearing Weight: Memory, Data, and the Practice of Remembrance, I investigate how memory acquires material gravity across biological, technological, and cultural systems. Through critical theory and artistic research, I propose bearing weight as a way of knowing—a framework for sensing how knowledge is carried, preserved, and transformed through bodies and infrastructures. My dissertation exhibition, Commit to Memory, Know It Will Perish (July 3rd - August 9, 2025, Gallery 4Culture, Seattle, WA), serves as both culmination and method: a site where theory and praxis converge. The exhibition stages remembrance as a living system that merges microbial, digital, and human processes of remembering and forgetting, encoding text into bacterial DNA to explore how memory circulates, decays, and is reborn. Through this and related works, I examine how artistic practice performs theory—how making and doing become modes of thinking. I conclude by reframing artificial intelligence through an embodied ethics of care, proposing weight as both an artistic methodology and an ethical measure for future knowledge practices.