This work consists of a series of positive film slides placed on a slide projector. The film that loops on the slide show is a series of fictional portraits of people. The photographs were synthesised by artificial intelligence, with the artist organising his family albums before curating and selecting the pictures to form an original data set. The artist then used different AI models to process them, creating images that appear to be based on the artist's memories but which are nonetheless ambiguous, difficult to recognize.
Them illustrates how memory is mediated and transformed through technology. In order to explore how family photographs are based on personal memories, our individual memory can here be interpreted and reconstructed through the eyes of a machine. Family portraits are the most common and mundane photographic subject matter. The artist collected his datasets from a group of family pictures captured using a film camera, which were then processed digitally by machine learning and recreated using a text-to-image conversion process, turning these familiar family portraits into fictional figures. The portraits of ordinary family members are thus turned into unrecognisable digital figures and then printed back into the medium of analog film. The past private memory has been estranged through technology. In this way, the work explores the reconstruction of human memory by machines, and imagines the potential relationship between photography and artificial intelligence.
