The series "The Toys That Made Me" documents Soviet children's toys through the perspective of artificial intelligence. Using white backgrounds, centered composition, and isolation of objects, each photograph transforms playthings into neutral data for machine recognition—form, material, color, taxonomy. Yet behind this clinical optical framework lies the collective memory of a generation that played with these toys, learned through these objects, and later created the technologies that made AI possible.
Each image presents an imagined algorithmic gaze upon a past the machine itself never experienced—but a past entirely necessary to its existence. The captions operate as a translation layer, converting mundane plastic figures into philosophical statements about technology, memory, and the unspoken connection between analog childhood and digital futures.
This is a project about what gets lost in digitization, and what remains visible only to those who remember.
