Hannah Suzanna
The Ephemeral Altar & The Floating Grave

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Cyprus trees set in blend-mode difference over a tiled layer made from GAN generated imagery, all set on a pink background - The Ephemeral Altar & The Floating Grave - Hannah Suzanna

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Purple watercolor and ink sketch of how to turn a lingcod scull into a structure held by a hand in front of a blurred wire sculpture. - The Ephemeral Altar & The Floating Grave - Hannah Suzanna

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Hannah Suzanna standing in front of some of her partially completed wire sculptures, including a blade of grass, a hand, and a magnolia. - The Ephemeral Altar & The Floating Grave - Hannah Suzanna

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Photo of partially completed magnolia sculpture made from wire and tulle. - The Ephemeral Altar & The Floating Grave - Hannah Suzanna

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Sketch of how blades of grass, hands, magnolia, and lingcod skull can be arranged into a floating grave - The Ephemeral Altar & The Floating Grave - Hannah Suzanna

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Sketch of how blades of grass can be turned into a wire sculpture. Page held by hand in front of a wire and fabric sculpture of a magnolia. - The Ephemeral Altar & The Floating Grave - Hannah Suzanna

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Sketch of how to turn a lingcod jaw bone into a wire structure.

“Decomposition is not a solitary act. Disintegration of a corpse is collaborative. Some of it is eaten by carrion birds, bones might be ground down into sand, flesh ends up in the dogs’ fur and in divots within soles of shoes. The water evaporates from the body, liquid returning to the air or draining back into the ocean. Oneness is visible in blending anatomy with landscape, flesh turning to energy within a digestive tract.”

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ABSTRACT

Using tarot and machine learning, I actively de-compose the narrative of four disintegrating sites — a conservation cemetery in North-Central Florida, my Dad’s house in California, an abandoned parking lot near my apartment in Providence, RI, and myself as an inherently mortal human.

Rather than a tool for prediction, I see tarot as a system of decay — breaking down human experiences into archetypes to allow presence with our existence.

What happens when we look at other predictive technologies, such as machine learning, as means of breaking apart our reality too? When talking about science fiction or speculative fiction, a repeated idea is that these stories are not about the future but about the present. Instead of perpetuating current biases through adhering to technological predictions, maybe we could more deeply recognize our flawed ideologies — and actively decay them.

I’m imagining a world where instead of creating institutions that we work to immortalize (at the expense of the humans and other beings who have to exist within them), we create systems-of-care that are built with their own dissolution in mind — Decomposition built in so new life can grow, so mutual thriving can evolve.