by Tatyane Ramos
This intimate-critical essay explores what futures become possible when family archives, Black domestic memory, and handmade datasets are treated not as nostalgic materials, but as infrastructures for questioning and engaging in dialogue with the formation of human and machine imaginaries. What world emerges when we refuse to live within a linear path of erasure and allow time to dance?
In the boxes of photographs kept in my great-aunt’s house, I find not only fragments of my family’s life. I also find a technology of permanence and care. What I can now call a handmade dataset, I also choose to call: the decision to remain at a scale where relationships still matter. A form of care that does not present itself as theory, but as a repeated gesture: to keep, to separate, to name, to remember, to protect, to retell, to pass on. Photographs in old envelopes, albums carefully kept in drawers for longer than I have been alive, loose images, dedications written in cursive by someone who learned calligraphy in school, who wrote by hand every day, or maybe simply had beautiful handwriting. Parties, many parties, children, birthdays, baptisms, Sundays, someone crossing the background of the scene, an unnamed hand holding a glass, very little room to crop, erase, or edit—a world of burned photographs.
I am looking at a technological infrastructure of intimate memory, an intelligence of care. The image is never just an image. It plays a role in how a society learns to see itself and organize the value of lives. Every element in an image carries weight in our imagination, just as it does in the imagination of a machine. We interpret images every day through our own systems of learning and training. bell hooks writes about the politics of images and how representation shapes not only how others see us, but also how we begin to imagine ourselves (hooks, 1992). Perhaps this is why the Black domestic archive operates at such a particular frequency: it exists between intimacy and the historical struggle for presence, for evidence, for proof of existence.
This essay engages in dialogue with critical futures studies, decolonial futures, feminist futures, futures literacy, and Afrofuturism, while remaining grounded in the domestic scale from which it speaks. In a pluriversal approach to Futures Studies, Kwamou Eva Feukeu argues that decolonial, feminist, Afrofuturist, and African forms of futurity should not be treated as peripheral additions to the field, but as central ways of redefining what Futures Studies is and whom it serves (Feukeu, 2024). I take this seriously. The question “which archives shaped your imagination?” is not merely a question about memory or representation. It is also a question about the future: what materials, absences, images, stories, and classifications have shaped our capacity to anticipate? What becomes imaginable when the archives that shaped us were violently distorted or deliberately kept from public knowledge?
In that sense, this work also touches on futures literacy. Futures literacy has been defined as the capacity to understand why and how living beings anticipate (Miller, 2018). Feukeu expands this debate by arguing that reframing is not only a rational exercise but a collective, sensory, and political practice against the impoverishment and colonization of the imagination (Feukeu, 2025). If anticipatory assumptions shape how people imagine futures, then archives are among the places where those assumptions are formed. The archive shapes the imagination before the future is even identified as such. To ask which archives shaped my imagination is therefore to ask which visual influences, which domestic teachings, which inherited silences, and which repeated images have defined the limits of what I can expect, desire, fear, reject, or create.
In a family photograph, the Black body can appear outside of surveillance, outside of accusation, and outside of the pedagogy of pain. It appears having lunch, dancing, playing, aging, celebrating, and repeating gestures that seem ordinary precisely because they belong to a life that is alive and lived together with the person holding the camera. Simone Browne reminds us that technologies of surveillance and classification are inseparable from the histories of Blackness and racial control (Browne, 2015). Tina Campt teaches us to listen to images as quiet, embodied, and affective forms of historical knowledge (Campt, 2017). Saidiya Hartman’s work on archival absence and critical fabulation also helps us understand that what survives in an archive is never innocent, and what is missing continues to shape the realm of the imagination (Hartman, 2008). The message is as important as the messenger, and it is within this apparent banality that I choose to anchor the power of my thinking, my imagination, and my àṣẹ.
When an aunt keeps a box of photographs, she may not be thinking about digital heritage or synthetic memory, but there is a practice of continuity there—a very concrete refusal of disappearance. It is a way of saying: we were here, we were like this, we laughed like this, our houses were these colors, our parties had these cakes, our bodies occupied this space in this light.
This private memory, when examined closely, begins to speak of something public. It speaks of which images were preserved, which were distorted, which are absent, and which were repeated until they began to seem like the only possible path—a visual monoculture. It speaks of which visual grammars were chosen as the diet of social thought and, today, also as the diet of artificial thought. When I find myself wondering whether I am someone who only pretends to make choices—since “choice” is a word that guides my research almost all the time—I return to my central question: which archives shaped my imagination?
Thinking through Afrofuturism helps me clarify what is at stake in this question, but it does not fully encompass the practice I am describing. Afrofuturism has long opened up space for Black speculative imagination, technology, counter-futures, and liberation (Nelson, 2002; Eshun, 2003; Womack, 2013; Anderson, 2016). Within the *Journal of Futures Studies* itself, the special issue “When is Wakanda? Afrofuturism and Dark Speculative Futurity” has already placed Afrofuturism, Black speculative imagination, and dark speculative futurity in direct dialogue with the field of Futures Studies (Brooks et al., 2019). Afrofuturism asks what worlds become possible when Black life is not trapped within the afterlife of colonial and racial violence. It has created tools to imagine beyond imposed disappearance. This essay engages with that tradition, particularly with its insistence that imagination is political: not
merely a purified realm of positive creation, but a world-making force that moves, affects, sustains, and creates the many forms of well-being through which worlds become possible and are kept alive. But the speculative site from which I begin is not outer space, the city of the future, the spaceship, or the heroic technological horizon. It is the domestic archive. The aunt’s box. The wedding photograph. The handwritten dedication. The birthday table. The ordinary Black family image that refuses to be ordinary because history has made its survival extraordinary.
Thinking with datasets shifts the scale of this question, but not its nature. A dataset is also a collection of choices—a selection of images, texts, categories, and descriptions that teach a system—human or artificial—to recognize and select patterns. The technical promise often holds that the greater the volume, the better the result. But volume does not resolve the politics of erasure. Big data is not a neutral entity that simply contains the world. Data feminism reminds us that data practices are always structured by power, classification, embodiment, and context (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020). The desire to embrace the world is, in itself, a violent colonial desire, and perhaps this is why I am so drawn to small collections of visual embraces. Not the archive that seeks to conquer the world, but the image that transforms the backyard into a cosmos.
The volume of the world often expands the world as it has already been classified, extracted, and hierarchized. Safiya Noble shows how algorithmic systems can reproduce oppressive social relations under the guise of technical neutrality (Noble, 2018). Ruha Benjamin draws attention to technologies that appear innovative while perpetuating old forms of racial inequality through new interfaces (Benjamin, 2019). Browne, in her reflections on the surveillance of Blackness, reminds us that technologies of classification and observation do not emerge outside of history, but carry with them genealogies of racial control (Browne, 2015).
So when I say that human imaginaries are trained, and that machine imaginaries are also trained, I am not using metaphor merely as ornament. I am trying to identify a continuity. We learn to imagine from the images we receive, from the images we lack, from the images that wound us, and from the images that empower us. Machines, in turn, learn associations from the data they are given. If image-generation systems are fed by archives where the Black body appears as a threat, noise, exoticism, or absence, it is no surprise that their future images carry the limits of that training. There is always a boundary. The question is not only what the machine sees. The question is who taught the machine to see. Who chose the input.
This is where “handmade datasets” and “small data” cease to be merely technical terms and become, for me, an ethics of research. My handmade dataset is a set of data created by hand, from a place with a first and last name.And I choose “small data” not because the data is small in the sense of being insufficient, but because I want enough time for a conversation to unfold, without the pretense of becoming something bigger. A scale in which data has not been completely separated from the person, the family secrets, the house, the stories, the voice, the care, the Sunday lunches, and the silences that produced it. A scale that allows me to discover information about this dataset on a Monday at the church door, after lighting a candle for the departed, while talking to my great-aunt.
Handmade datasets also allow me to question the preconceived notion that intelligence must expand through scale, speed, and abstraction. In futures literacy, reframing asks us to
notice the assumptions that shape what we consider useful, plausible, or desirable (Feukeu, 2025). Handmade datasets reframe data by rejecting the idea that more data automatically means better information or imagination. They propose relation, memory, consent, locality, slowness, and accountability as epistemic criteria. They ask not only what can be generated, but what kind of relation must be preserved in the act of generation. To generate is never merely to produce. It is also to gestate, to wait, to remain accountable to what is becoming. We know, from the body and from memory, that generation demands time, care, and relationship. In that sense, they are not merely datasets. They are infrastructures of imagination.
This choice of “small scale” interests me because it contradicts the fantasy that all intelligence must grow fast in order to matter. Whether a blessing or a curse, I am a poet, and I keep choosing to see beauty in the smallest things—not simply out of hypersensitivity, but because I know, keenly, that everything is, in truth, both enormous and small. The aunt who keeps photographs, the grandmother who remembers names, the mother who knows who was at each party, the woman who organizes boxes, documents, clothes, recipes, and stories: all of them operate technological systems of continuity. Many Black families know these guardians. They may not have been called archivists, but they sustained living archives.
They may not have been called researchers, but they developed methods. They may not have been called information scientists, but they kept the technologies of memory functioning within homes, closets, photo albums, and endlessly repetitive conversations that made someone memorize certain stories backward. Long live the intention!
This is also why Black domestic memory matters to Futures Studies. It brings the future back to bodies, homes, gestures, and intergenerational responsibility. Feminist futures remind us that the future involves flesh, labor, care, and unequal material conditions (Feukeu, 2024).
Decolonial futures challenge the idea that the future is a neutral horizon available to everyone in the same way. They ask who has been authorized to anticipate, who has been turned into an object of prediction, and whose worlds have been treated as part of the past rather than the future. If the future is a public good, as decolonial futures scholarship has argued, then domestic archives are not marginal materials. They are places where excluded forms of public imagination may have survived.
I am not trying to prove that the boxes of photographs in my aunt’s house fit perfectly inside machines. Nor am I trying to correct biases so that existing systems become more polite, refined, or well-adjusted. I am interested in creating tension within the infrastructures that organize the gaze. I want to ask what happens when an image of a beautiful wedding that took place in Rio de Janeiro in the 1960s—attended, organized, and hosted by Black people—enters into dialogue with a system trained by other visual genealogies. What does it displace, what does it reveal, what does it refuse, and what does it teach about the distance between description and presence?
The process I first developed as The Prompt Laboratory, and now continue through my broader research at MOLA (Memory, Orality, and Living Archives), uses images from my family archive as a dataset. These images are observed, described, and translated into text. The text becomes a prompt. The prompt is activated in conjunction with an image-generation model, making it possible to generate an open-ended series of images born from a photograph kept in my aunt’s house. This return is not an attempt to replace the original
photograph. The generated image is not the archive, but a question posed to the system. It reveals how the machine interprets intimacy, skin, celebration, kinship, territory, time, gesture, joy, and belonging; sometimes it comes close, sometimes it fails, and sometimes, precisely in its failure, it reveals the associations available to it.
Artists and researchers working with datasets have already demonstrated that datasets can be aesthetic, political, and methodological objects—not merely technical inputs. Anna Ridler’s *Myriad (Tulips)* and Caroline Sinders’s *Feminist Data Set* are important references here because they treat dataset creation as a situated practice, shaped by human decisions, categories, labor, and care (Ridler, 2018; Sinders, 2017–present). My own interest in handmade datasets stems from a different archive and a different wound, but shares the understanding that creating datasets is not neutral. It is a way of deciding what matters enough to be described, repeated, recombined, and made available to the imagination.
The entire process functions as a conversation between memory, language, and machine, but also as a test of the limits of technical imagination. A profound inquiry in which I must listen both to my aunt’s memory infrastructures and to a system whose surname I do not know. We sit together: me, my aunt, the systems, and my eleven-year-old self, who dreamed of becoming a poet, still trying to imagine something. Perhaps this is what I am trying to practice: a form of dialogue with technology that begins with the childlike freedom to explore. This one is for you, little Taty! To explore not as someone who wants to dominate a system, but as someone who approaches an infrastructure that already shapes everyday life and asks how else it might be reimagined. What kind of intelligence emerges when the focus is not on capture, but on care?
In my great-aunt’s boxes of photographs, I find more than just the past. I find a visual pedagogy. I find a theory of time. This matters because dominant futures practices have often inherited linear ideas of time: projection, progress, acceleration, arrival. Decolonial futures scholarship asks us to attend instead to multiple pasts, multiple presents, and multiple futures, and to the role of storytelling in opening up futures beyond linear projection (Terry et al., 2024). The Entangled Time Tree, for example, proposes that futures do not simply extend forward from a singular present, but grow through layered pasts, erased histories, ancestral relations, storytelling, and alternative temporalities (Terry et al., 2024). In Brazilian Black thought, Leda Maria Martins’s notion of spiral time also offers a crucial framework for understanding time as return, repetition, ancestry, performance, and transformation rather than as a straight line (Martins, 2021). This is close to what I feel when I open my aunt’s boxes. The photograph is not behind me. It is not a dead object from the past. It is a seed, a witness, a question, a spiral machine. It reorganizes the time from which I can imagine.
Not to resolve programmed failures of the imagination. Not to pacify their conflicts. Not to make everything transparent. I believe in opacity. I am devoted to the secret, and I know that not everything needs to be revealed. Not to correct biases, but to defy racist visual regimes. To open a crack, plant other seeds, reject monocultures, and insist that the datasets contained within my aunt’s boxes are also infrastructures of imagination: enormous and small, domestic and cosmic, capable of challenging the enthroned technological giant. The question that remains is not only what we can create with machines. The preceding question—perhaps more intimate and more dangerous—is another one, born from my first: which archives are shaping our imaginations?
Image Permission Note
Any images included with this manuscript are drawn from the author’s family archive and are used with permission. No third-party images are included.
References
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AI Disclosure
ChatGPT, utilizing GPT-5.5 Thinking, served as an editorial assistant for language editing and structural refinement, specifically to review the written English and ensure compliance with the Journal of Futures Studies — Perspectives submission criteria. The conceptual framework, memories, examples, methodology, and final editorial decisions are entirely the author’s own.
