ARCHIVES WIELD GREAT POWER: They shape memory and identity. What is selected, and how is it preserved and used? The current trend of networked data (museums putting their collections online, Google Books) makes content management systems interactive. This is the gamification of the archive.

For my most recent project, I formed my own interactive archive. Sixteen workers photographed a hundred thousand individual rose petals. Next, a machine-learning algorithm generated new, purely digital petals based on this data set. I then worked with producer Tyler Pridgen and developer Nate Turley alongside