Imagined Images
by Maria Mavropoulou
portfolio special mention call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023', 2023
Category: People and Communities
What is the use of a photograph? If nothing else, it’s a reference point to a specific moment in time, the moment of its creation, the moment it depicts. Especially family photographs are a tie to our personal history, an archive of whom we are and where we came from. They are “memory deposits” from where we keep sourcing the certainty of our life events even if our own memories of them are lost. In this new project personal memories are absorbed by A.I. and meshed with thousands of others to become a new breed of images, images resembling in an uncanny way those of our childhood photo albums. But what is the use of this new kind of image since they lose their fundamental tie to reality? What is the memory they hold? To whom are they precious, heirlooms that must be preserved?
Trying to reconcile with my own family history, one of displacement, loss and deprivation I visualized with the use of DALLE-2 moments that happened, moments that were unphotographed, moments I imagined, moments I was told about, moments I have hoped to happen, moments that never happened in order to ask myself: How can one rewrite his own history?
also from Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023