Long Term Short Term Memories (sketches from a garden in Argentina)
The piece, the fourth collaboration between Anna Ridler and Sofia Crespo, was created using a dataset of only photographs both artists took on various trips to Argentina, is translated and retranslated using a variety of different AI models, from the analogue to the digital and back again. Presented here is some of this process - a number of polaroids of already synthetic images that were used for training and the resulting digital images. The artists believe that this iterative method, driven by AI, brings them close to the process described in Borges' short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius where copies over time and cycles contain 'a purity of line not found in the original'. It also draws parallels with the way that neuroscientists have discovered that the process of recalling a memory activates the same processes as the act of creating a memory - every time something is remembered it is also actively recreated. The duality of memory is combined in this work in the hazy blurry nature of polaroids and the crisp sharp detail of the digital.
Process and Research
There's a line in a Borges short story where he talks about 'copies of copies of copies' until there's a 'purity of line' not found in the original. I think a lot about that when I'm making. At some point, everything started out as a real object and as it gets abstracted further and further it becomes less 'real'. The real peony becomes a photograph which then becomes a generative image, and each time it gets corrupted from its original state. But there's this weird beauty that doesn't exist in the original object. Weird in its original sense – unexpected or unnatural.
References and Inspiration
Dissemination
The contract for this work is 0x88c010ac338b58A542C8Fb720A092BdA3775494F