On Halloween, crawling around Saint Theresa’s Cemetery in Sydney, Cape Breton, looking for a great grandfather’s grave. Found the wrong John Carroll instead — a different man, different dates, same name. A grave etching was made anyway.
The project unfolds from that moment of mistaken identity into a meditation on family, archive, and the limits of documentation. A hand-bound QR codebook sits on a pallet altar in the gallery space. Each QR code opens a document: a scan, a photograph, a field note, a fragment of family history. The altar is the interface; the codebook is the key; the archive speaks if you ask it correctly.
“Archivomancy: the practice of communing with ancestral documents as a form of divination. The archive does not merely record the past — it predicts the present.”
The interactive component is a browser-based terminal interface. It opens with “Initialize Access” — a prompt that positions the visitor as an operator attempting to gain entry to a system that holds family records, field notes, and archival fragments. The archive responds; it does not simply display.