The Mutable Archive: A Cure for Immortality

The Mutable Archive: A Cure for Immortality is an expanded cinema performance work written and edited by Patricia Olynyk, produced and directed by Adam Hogan and Patricia Olynyk, and featuring a live score performed by Adam Hogan, presented in collaboration with the UC Irvine Departments of Art and Drama.

The Mutable Archive: A Cure for Immortality is a collaborative, cross-disciplinary multimedia installation that asks what unstable narratives can reveal about truth. Drawing from photographs housed in anatomical museums — including the Narrenturm in Vienna and the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia — the project pairs skulls marked by post-mortem inscriptions with archival cards containing only fragmentary information about the subject. Working from these partial records, Olynyk invites collaborators across fields to write and perform speculative narratives, foregrounding how assumption and subjectivity shape what we accept as knowledge.

On Thursday, February 12, 2026 (5:30 – 7:30 p.m.), UCI Illuminations and the UCI Center for Medical Humanities will host The Mutable Archive: A Cure for Immortality at the UCI Arts Experimental Media Performance Lab. A reception at 5:30 p.m. will welcome attendees into the installation environment. At 6 p.m., media artist and composer Adam Hogan will activate the installation through a live diffused electroacoustic score that incorporates narrative monologues. A panel discussion at 6:30 p.m. will bring the artists together with invited UCI respondents to consider questions of evidence, ethics, and interpretation — particularly how historical and archival research intersects with critical theory and speculative narrative to address gaps in the historical record (aligned with critical fabulation, a concept developed by scholar Saidiya Hartman). Audiences are invited to experience the work and then engage in dialogue. A matinee performance will take place on Friday, February 13 at 1 p.m., followed by an informal Q&A with Olynyk and Hogan.

The Mutable Archive: A Cure for Immortality is significant for how it connects the history of anatomical collecting and medical display to present-day conversations around colonial violence, race, gender, class disparity, and cultural bias. Rather than treating archives as neutral, the work highlights uneven documentation and the enduring impacts of taxonomic thinking, including early eugenic frameworks. In the spirit of Illuminations — creating meaningful arts experiences for students across majors — this event demonstrates how creative practice can sharpen critical inquiry and deepen understanding of how institutional records might be approached with greater care, empathy, and accountability. The project offers a strong bridge between artistic practice and research-led creative work, while also speaking directly to data science, statistics, and AI-related inquiry as a vivid case study in inference from incomplete records, interpretive bias, and ethical responsibility.

This event is the first of two planned arts-centered medical humanities collaborations with Washington University in St. Louis. In Fall 2026, members of the UCI Medical Humanities community will travel to St. Louis for a symposium event.