The New Castle and Frenchtown Railroad (NCFRR) was one of the first railroads in the United States. The railroad only operated for 28 years; as newer, more direct railways were built, the New Castle and Frenchtown Railroad was abandoned, and then without a commercial artery, the town of Frenchtown was also deserted. This obsolescence of the railroad and town is analogous to digital technological loss in its root in the movement of capital and technological change. In this project, I use the archive in conjunction with contemporary data to try and recreate a ghost without its community. In the process of this re-creation, I use techniques of glitch, loss, and layering to question the role of data, archives, and recreation in understanding place, loss and memory.

In this ongoing project, I am interested in creating a portrait of a site (Minebank Run in Parkville, Maryland), and the ways in which we can know a space through data, and the many ways through which data-driven ways of knowing will fail us. There is a contemporary inclination to assume we can truly know things (ourselves, the natural environment, economic trends, image-making techniques) through machine learning or traditional mathematical algorithms. However, these data-driven models don’t accurately model out projections or create understanding, but instead create a compressed average of the data provided.