In this Critical Wednesday post I review the work of Sarah Sweeney, an American artist working with AI to converse with her father who died when she was 17. Her work is part of The Doughnut (W)Hole Pavilion for The Wrong Biennale running through the end of March. Recently, we sat down to talk more about her research for My Deepfake Dad.

I can’t discuss Sarah Sweeney’s My Deepfake Dad[1] without thinking of my own dad. An acknowledgement of the deep emotional connection I feel to Sarah’s work I hope will be illuminating. We are both fatherless daughters, and that is where everything unsettles.

My Deepfake Dad is a series of AI-assisted conversations Sarah has with her dad, who died when she was 17. She told me it began out of a deep desire to talk to her dad again.[2] She felt this compulsion when she was the same age as her dad when he died. I know something of this too. Perhaps it is why birds make the return migration each year. The need to return to the place where your life changed forever at a congruent marker in time is a force too strong to resist. “How am I going to find out what he would have said?”[3] Sarah tells me was her biggest question.

Sarah figured there were six ways she could answer this question: through interviews with her sisters and mother; going through her dad’s archive of writing, notes, and recorded messages; engaging a spiritual medium; working through Gestalt ‘empty chair’ therapy; using a chatbot; and reenacting the immediacy of recording thoughts in the car, as her dad had done when he was alive. Her dad was a screenwriter in Los Angeles and Sarah had access to a large archive of her dad’s words. My own father died when I was a baby. I have a few photographs of him, his desk, his leather suitcase, his bible, a letter he wrote, and the stories my grandmother told me about him. As a boy, he went missing once and his parents were terrified he had fallen over a cliff on Puget Sound. He was found with a face blue from eating blueberries. I have no memory of my father, just conjured imaginings from these traces. That Sarah could access all these personal testimonies and archive materials left me bereft.

I asked Sarah what she had discovered through the process of making this work. “This project is about unsettling this idea that there is just one version of someone who exists in our memory after someone dies,” she explained.[4] Sarah’s sisters and mother each described a different person to the dad Sarah knew. It was as if she had met a stranger named ‘dad.’ Sarah realised that the relationships they each had with her dad were the reason their impressions of him were so different. Give that a moment. Who we are in interaction with another person influences the relationship we have with them, and in turn, the relationship shapes our impression of them. I’m struck by something in Sarah’s observation that I’ve never considered before—and I say this as someone who has made a study of the self—who I am in relation to a loved one is as significant to my impression of that person as their own projection of self. It is not who I am or who they are that makes our relationship; but it is my self in response to their self which is responding to my self, and reflecting back to me.

Paul Ricoeur explained that selves are networked; made up of a self who thinks, reasons, and doubts, and a self that is understood as being other because we see our otherness reflected in those we see as ‘other’ and separate to ourselves.[5] However, the idea that how I am in a relationship causes a difference in the person I love, therefore causing my impression of them to be relevant only to me, is something beyond being ‘networked.’ This influential multiplicity of reflectivity—we might call it ‘refraction’— can be seen by recognising that the self known to Sarah’s dad died with him, but the self that was interjected within his relationships with his family remain in the form of unique impressions made up of the selves that were reflected to each other in their relationships. This is a fragmented self we all have, but we don’t necessarily see the pieces because our own perceived continuous self overrides many of these fragmentations.

Everyone in Sarah’s family knew the voice speaking in My Deepfake Dad wasn’t Sarah’s dad, even though he was speaking his own words.  Sarah was writing a character called ‘dad’ and this character was responding to Sarah’s questions. It was astonishing to see the agency Deepfake Dad had in the conversations with Sarah—but then, as Sarah wrote the agency into the script that her dad’s voice recreated by AI would say, we can sense through Sarah’s memory, how her relationship with her dad might have transpired when he was alive.[6] But beyond this, Sarah was astonished to discover that she formed new memories of her dad when she found a film of him she had never seen. The question of forming new memories of someone after their death became a driving question for her in the project, as she referred to the ‘prosthetic memory’ she experienced on seeing this found film.  

Alison Landsberg, who wrote on the subject in 2004, explains:

Prosthetic memories originate outside a person’s lived experience and yet are taken on and worn by that person through mass cultural technologies of memory. The idea of prosthetic memory, then, rejects the notion that all memories—and, by extension, the identities that those memories sustain—are necessarily and substantively shaped by lived social context. Prosthetic memories are not “socially constructed” in that they do not emerge as the result of living and being raised in particular social frameworks.[7]

In other words, Sarah’s memory of her dad reflected their relationship directly. But when she discovered new information about her dad, those memories would form outside of her dad’s living memory. They were second-hand and had no corporal reflection, like all the memories I had of my dad. My Deepfake Dad uncovers a slippage between our physical lived memory, prosthetic memory, and the ‘memory’ teased out through the use of AI—especially as Sarah works to refine the recreated voice of her father for My Deepfake Dad.

Sarah’s memory of her dad is part of her, is part of the refracted selves she experienced in their relationship together. New memories from the found film of her dad are now layered on top of her lived memories. While the scripted AI voice of her dad recreated from archive recordings of his voice simulate the presence of her dad in an act of re-membered memory, by which I mean the reattachment of memory to a physical manifestation of a dead dad. The prosthetic memory can combine with lived memory because there is a shared threshold of empathy. However, the AI-assisted recreation of a beloved voice feels uncanny, even in its close resemblance. We are accustomed to the distance imposed by memory. We may even accommodate the introduction of second-hand prosthetic memories. But when technology simulates memory through rendering a physical attribute, the experience is jolting. We have not had enough experience yet with AI to sense this rendering as commonplace. So, we slip—between time, thought, emotion, sensibilities, and the memories that sustain us and those we love.

John Berger said:

History is not something that is directly handed on like a loaf of bread from one person to another. Often, often it is hidden. Often it has to be re-found without being simplified. So often today people talk about history as though it gave the answers…[Even] in that simplified version, what is forgotten is the hope that it contained. Hope generates actions and sacrifices, which still existed and had their influence, even if in part or largely, those hopes were illusory.[8]

Substitute ‘history’ for ‘the self’ and My Deepfake Dad resonates profoundly to this statement, because this work shows that even through the research, the interviews, the cataloguing, and the memory, what has gone is the hope of ever reaching Sarah’s dad or fully knowing the man he was. AI will not give us this hope. Hope is a human attribute, and possibly one of the most important.

Sarah calls My Deepfake Dad an ‘inverse portrait.’ It is an image made of leftover traces, fragments, and impressions. It is a portrait that instead of alluding to the three-dimensional time/space it should occupy, it falls in on itself from scant substance to hold it together. This reinforcing substance is not made of the words that remain, or the memories that persist, it is not even flesh and blood. The fortifications needed to hold together a portrait are the emanations that flesh and blood and emotion put forth in a continuously refracted self, entangling with other refracted selves in reflected impressions. It is the self that we see reflected in others, and from which we take hope.

My Deepfake Dad is part of The Doughnut (W)Hole Pavilion curated by Kim Shaw and produced by Sarah-Jane Field for The Wrong Biennale until 31 March 2026.

[1] Sweeney, S., 2025. My deepfake dad. Available at: https://www.mydeepfakedad.com/ [Accessed: 18 Oct 2025].

[2] Boyer, J., 2025. Interview with Sarah Sweeney. Unpublished as of this writing.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ricoeur, P., 1992. Oneself as another. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

[6] “For each of the conversations in the series,” Sarah explained to me, “I visit family members, Gestalt therapists, mediums, and others who can help me imagine what these conversations would have been like. When my research is completed, I sift through the transcripts and identify the pieces that resonate with me. I position and rearrange each piece until they start to take the shape of a conversation. After the script is completed, I record my part and then work with the AI model to create my father’s responses (audio clips). The final step is reassembling the clips in ProTools where I can adjust the timing and refine the sound.

[7] Landsberg, A., 2004. Prosthetic memory: the transformation of American remembrance in the age of mass culture. Columbia University Press: New York, NY, p.19.

[8] Serpentine, 2015. Memory marathon 2012 – John Berger in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_Mmz4-v7CU [Accessed: 1 Feb 2026].