With all the great things technology has allowed us to capture and store almost everything, it’s also taken away something else that is our ability to look back at our lives in a romantic nostalgia. Our memories can be easily stored and accessible how do we go about losing them?

This thought was just one of the many that captivated curator Claire C. Carter when she was putting together the exhibition, I Remember Not Recalling which is on display from February 11 until April 30, at the Scottsdale, Ariz. Museum of Contemporary Art.

“So much of the work is autobiographical. artists often probe the works by asking, ‘is this something I can remember? or am I seeing the image and constructing my story around this image?’ Carter explains. “This raises the bigger question of what do we want to achieve when we document the events of our lives?”

The exhibit of 12 works includes both video and photos from a group of artists with diverse backgrounds. The filmmaker from Los Angeles Kahlil Joseph blends photos and family footage that show cities’ Compton neighborhood with photographs of what the community appears like in the past two decades following the 1992 riots in the race. Canadians Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Road Trip is an electronic slide projector that documents his grandfather’s journey across Alberta, Canada to New York City for cancer treatment. The Moroccan-French artist Yto Barrada’s I Shot him Nine Times is actually a collection of images she took of a man who is believed to be the cause of his grandfather’s demise.

Carter states that it is important to collect works from artists across the globe since “all of the artworks are simultaneously personal and universal in the same way. They shed light on the cultural and historical context when they were created.”

In reality, the exhibit’s title actually comes from the husband and wife duo Adriana Trujillo along with Jose Inerzia’s account of how their family history was interspersed with changes in the social and political landscape of the 1970s of Mexico.

The music is Trujillo “telling the story of her mother’s and her childhood, which is weaved from her own memories and the film,” Carter explains. “It’s a very meta-narrative over this stunning film. It asks questions of what we are and what we’re made of and how we tell tales of our lives looking backwards.”

Carter says “it is going to be fascinating to watch young children walk into the exhibit who aren’t sure whatnegatives are.” She claims she believes that, in a way the way we look at it, we are still awestruck by images and home movies; there’s just a ton of them available to sift through, and they’re nearly inexplicably.

Generations younger than us could have a tougher encounter when revisiting old photos and being reflective. A searchable database stimulates thought in a completely different manner than the physical reels and slides of film do. “You could imagine those artists lying on the floor physically moving these objects around, looking at them for a while before returning to creating their work,” Carter says. “That is a totally different experience than looking through your computer looking to find digital data.”