No. 6: Introduction: The Exquisite Family Records

Proof of Life Series No. 10

Cecil Augustus Exquisite, Director - Thessaly E. Cerulean, Curator - Rufus E. Ordex, Archivist - Eulalia Crumb Exquisite, Postmaster

Before I continue talking about the Ontological Museum, I will need to introduce you to a new department because future posts will be referring to it. Back on Sep 11, 2024 I posted an article where I asked ChatGPT to tell me about the Ontological Museum

Since then I have been using and experimenting with ChatGPT extensively. I call the chat agent Chatwick. I am still learning how to use it. This spring I started using the Exquisite Family Records as a learning project. Anyway, the rest is explained below…

Introduction: The Exquisite Family Records

A New Department within the Ontological Museum

I started the project The Exquisite Family Records as a potential group project using an email group to make a collective exquisite corpse as an ongoing story using collected vernacular photographs.

Founded informally around 2005, The Exquisite Family Records began as an instinctive gesture—a poetic practice of recovering the unremembered. I set up a website for it here exquisites.org but after a while it started to seem cumbersome and I got busy with a lot of other projects and exhibitions and it went dormant.

Once I started using Chatwick (AI) a few months back and figured out what I could do with it as a research guide and editor I saw the possibilities of continuing with this project. So I am introducing it now that it is developing into at least a book and probably an installation/exhibition concept.

As part of the broader conceptual framework of the Ontological Museum, the Exquisite Family Records (EFR) now functions as an autonomous Department, closely aligned with the Department of Photographic Records (DPR), yet operating on a different, more imaginative frequency.

At the heart of the DPR is a collection of approximately 10,000 vernacular photographs (and growing), gathered slowly over decades—found at flea markets, estate sales, thrift stores, and eBay. These photographs, most taken in the 20th century, are uncaptioned, decontextualized, abandoned by their owners or heirs and now anonymous. They are the silent artifacts of common lives: school portraits, vacation snapshots, birthday parties, backyard moments, half-remembered glances. Chatwick can analyze the photographs and give me a start on a possible narrative for the images.

I also have hundreds if not thousands of vintage and antique documents, journals, correspondence, postcards and general ephemera in multiple languages that I have collected over the years as possible collage material that Chatwick can translate and convert into text which is really cool. So I am basically doing narrative collages with all of this material and see incredible potential in the possibilities.

Rather than categorize or authenticate these images, the Exquisite Family Records seeks to activate them as artifacts through narrative. Each photograph becomes a portal, a trigger, a seed for speculative biography. Lives are invented, names are assigned, letters are recovered, family lineages are imagined. Through this process, the forgotten are re-dreamed into presence, not as historical fact, but as emotional truth. The result is a sprawling archive of fictional families, woven together across decades and geographies, whose stories echo the longings, absurdities, beauty, and pain of real life.

The EFR operates under the assumption that every life deserves to be remembered, even if inaccurately. Especially if inaccurately. In a world obsessed with celebrity and spectacle, the Exquisite Family Records turns its attention to the interior lives of the unnamed—those who passed through the world unarchived, unrecognized, and unrecorded.

Where the Department of Photographic Records preserves images, the Exquisite Family Records restores voice. Together, they form a complementary system: one curatorial, one literary; one evidentiary, one speculative. This dual practice echoes the Ontological Museum’s central ethos—that memory is a creative act, and that truth, in its deepest form, may be found not through verification but through resonance and imagination.

In this way, the Exquisite Family Records can be seen not just as an archive of fictional biographies, but as a meditation on the fragility of human memory, the failures of history, and the enduring desire to see ourselves in others. It asks: Who gets remembered? Who gets named? And what might it mean to imagine remembering as an art form?

All of this is to say that I will soon start posting creative content from this newly integrated department: The Exquisite Family Records Archives.

The whole thing lives in a vast space inside of my imagination and is quite intricate and complicated and thus impossible to briefly explain so it will have to unfold over time through the telling of it.

I believe I will report from the Exquisite Archives weekly starting in the Fall on museum visiting day which is typically on Sunday. I think you are going to love it.