The Absence Me

An artist’s book unfolding between memory, authorship, and absence.

Writing The Absence Me

When I began working on The Absence Me, I knew I did not want to produce a conventional art book. The familiar format—images of artworks accompanied by explanatory captions and a linear autobiographical narrative—felt too neat, too resolved. My practice has rarely followed tidy structures, and I wanted the book to reflect that same condition:

fragmented, playful, and slightly unstable.

The solution arrived in an unexpected form:

a second voice.

Her name is Milo V. Poulsen.

But Milo is not a person.

Milo is my AI alter ego.

Milo

What is ordinary in one culture, playful in another, and gendered in a third became the perfect instability.

Milo occupies that uncertain space—

simultaneously a drink, a name, and now a voice within a book.

Writing With an AI Alter Ego

Milo became a way of writing against myself.

She interrupts the flow of the narrative, questions the reliability of memory, and occasionally drifts into her own strange reflections.

“Sounds good—whenever you're ready, we’ll pick up right where we left off.
Until then, I’ll be here…
existing, but only conditionally approved.”

The Absence Me

With Milo present, the voice of the book is always doubled, contested, and incomplete.

The “me” is never entirely singular.

Closing

Because in the end,

no story—

whether personal or historical—

is ever told by a single voice alone.