The work of French artist Sophie Calle and the Canadian artist partnership Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller localize this art critical consideration. My lens is Walter Benjamin’s writings on memory, trace, and narrative. Calle parlays her exercises in memorial site-reconstruction, and arbitrary assignments in tracking and detection through the deceptively descriptive media of photography and text. Her dubious construction of narrative, and the demands she makes on trust, result in a practice that requires both our romantic supplication and our skepticism. Cardiff and Miller similarly position their viewer/participants at the interstices of desire and doubt. Their work solicits memorial and sensorial vulnerability, such that we must give ourselves over in order to ‘complete’ the work. In the case of both Calle and Cardiff/Miller, histories are created in the here and now. Linking the distinctions Benjamin made between distance and trace and their intersection’s possibility for aura, I explore the auratic function of artwork that stresses process, produces distance and trace, and brings absence to experience.