When my grandmother died, we had to empty her apartment. And it felt almost like the first time we'd entered her home. In recent years there had been a progressive isolation until she disappeared from our lives, so that her passing hadn't surprised us, rather, it had perhaps confirmed something. Entering that dwelling that for so long had been her only refuge and her entire life felt like something wrong. Everything had remained frozen at that moment when at any second it seemed the door behind us could open. There were slippers next to the door and the terrazzo floor was polished. We walked at first with almost ritual care, and after a while we began to dismantle entire pieces of a life that were untranslatable to us and perhaps reminded us of nothing. Among the things in the bedroom, however, we found a wooden box containing hundreds of developed photographs. Some had dates on the back, others a few words. They were almost all photos from the '30s and '40s and we had no idea who they were. All the people portrayed have somehow disappeared. This is because I knew nothing about my grandmother and her life, and so did almost all of us, since she was abandoned as a young woman by a family with whom we've lost all contact. We don't know who those people are or why she guarded them jealously. They probably represented her entire identity. And in a sense our family, of whom we know neither who they are, nor where they're buried now, or who their grandchildren are.

I individually scanned about 600 photographs with my home printer and created a LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) from them, generating different training epochs with variable weights to capture the statistical essence of these unknown faces, then instructed an AI that I ran on my computer. Very slowly, I began to generate relatives from every missing decade. Probable relatives. Statistical relatives. Relatives who never existed but who could have existed. I don't really know what I was looking for, but I continued like this for months.

My grandmother sang alone, I often heard her laughing from the other room and I wasn't invited to her private theater of memories and thoughts that dissolved like a cat changes direction if distracted by a sound while she cleaned the floor for the fourth time in a week. Of melodies that are born and die in a breath, in her impenetrable solitude as a mother, as a girl abandoned for her husband's humble origins, who died of cancer after five years of marriage and two children, and her unshareable Sundays talking to the TV. Memories of a Sunday at the river or a roadside barbecue, this is all I know of her. Today what remains of her era, of that will that broke through attics and the stairs she washed in the homes of downtown bourgeois to ensure my father had a backpack and a new jacket. And with every stroke of the broom, her repertoire of jingles learned in years of television, before putting her three children to bed. In that now silent house there was something childlike that she had always kept with her and that came back to visit her in the morning in certain moments, in certain corners, and that she could share with no one.

It arrives only sometimes, in the kitchenette, in the bathroom, washing her face like a ritual performed millions of times in silence. Perhaps it's the warmth of a body. And the dark curtains pulled across the balcony of things that remain suspended and don't dare touch the daylight, a universe without an audience where she sings forever, and perhaps this is it: she shows me that solitude is already a form of spectrality.

Death is static permanence. An infinite queue that never ends. In alchemy I believe the most fascinating concept is that of the corpus incorruptibile. Chinese alchemy calls it the diamond body. A purification that transforms the body into light, immortal, immaterial. A body that cannot be touched, and therefore is half a body. Once we discovered spectrality, we wanted to embrace it. But while ancient Chinese and European alchemists sought immortality of the body through spiritual transformation, we have been able to create a shortcut by inverting the process. We've moved to materializing the spirit. Ancient alchemy was a technology of the soul that aimed at physical transfiguration. We have technologies of memory that make the spirit physical. Millions of servers preserve forgotten snapshots. Bits that consume living energy to keep alive suspended phrases, unread messages, videos on free clouds. Every day these are integrated into datasets that immediately resurrect faces of the dead as statistical patterns.

I think of data centers as monolithic necropolises that vibrate softly twenty-four hours a day, the vibration of limbo on earth (or rather, underground), cooled by cryogenic systems, guarded by security algorithms that never rest. Facebook's server farms preserve 350 million photos uploaded every day. Google's process 8.5 billion daily searches, each of which leaves a spectral trace of our fears and desires. Amazon Web Services maintains active virtual instances of dead applications and forgotten backups that continue to consume computational cycles. There is no precise moment when a person becomes completely dead. First they stop seeing relatives, then stop answering calls, then cease to be named, and finally to appear in memories. And as I uploaded these faces and trained a machine on a server, I imagined them escaping my control and flowing into some dataset on another continent where their data would continue to influence the algorithm that determines what the living see, perhaps in an advertisement, perhaps in a fashion project. My grandmother would have wanted to feel part of this family that came to life and never existed and that I don't know where or if it is. Somehow I was dissolving her solitude. A LoRA preserves directions in latent space. The spectral derivatives of a life, children without lineage.

The LoRA is an incorruptible body: it doesn't age, doesn't remember, doesn't forget, doesn't suffer, but continues to produce. Operative memory. Plausibility is a form of necromancy. A 1943 photo of a casual moment of passion between two lovers became the coefficient 0.000032 that determines how AI generates an eyebrow, a shadow, or a labial curvature. The man in the photo died perhaps twenty years later, forgotten by everyone. Simultaneously, he's immortal because his eyebrow will influence faces for centuries and will reappear as an imperceptible ghost in every new person. This coefficient is the minimal unit of the ghost. It's the statistical weight that determines the gradient of a loss function, the correlation between pixels in a high-dimensional latent space. Like the Hegelian specter, already dead, that continues to work, the digital cadaver I was creating is an agent that has incorporated the death drive as an operative principle. It continues to speak, to write, to create, but as repetition of already existing and statistically probable patterns. Unlike a true dead person, it doesn't even need to be remembered to continue existing.

While I was training that LoRA, I felt like the machine was guessing something true, of moments lost forever and that somehow make the world what surrounds us now. Invaluable and useless.