The Things We Did and Didn’t Do is a site-specific installation that draws from the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History’s archives to explore how context shapes meaning, value, and interpretation. The exhibition examines the visual language of the gallery and the archive, considering how objects shift in significance when moved between spaces of display and storage. Using archival materials as points of departure, the installation reflects on memory, preservation, authorship, and the ways humans construct knowledge across time.

All exhibition texts—including object labels, introductory texts, and interpretive materials—were generated with artificial intelligence. Rather than providing factual documentation, the AI produces speculative interpretations based on visual information alone, generating narratives that may be accurate, misleading, or entirely fictional. By placing machine-generated texts alongside archival objects that bear traces of human activity, the exhibition creates a dialogue between human and artificial forms of interpretation, inviting reflection on trust, nostalgia, and technological change.

The exhibition takes its title from the song The Things We Did and Didn’t Do by The Magnetic Fields, a meditation on memory, missed possibilities, and the distance between lived experience and imagined histories. Here, the title expands beyond personal relationships to consider our changing relationship to technology and the evolving tools through which we understand ourselves and the world.

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