Dubrovnik Ghost Series

“Dubrovnik Ghost Series” – Neural Networks as a Diffractive Medium

(2018 – Ongoing) Film & Neural Network (cGAN) Generated Imagery

As part of an ongoing research project, Dubrovnik Ghost Series is an exploration of the nature of neural networks as a medium through which to tell a unique personal story.

The artist has employed neural networks to create a “ghost” of his late father’s creative spirit, and in doing so been able to “collaborate” with him to produce a series of images from the location of Dubrovnik, Croatia. The work takes the form of a “deconstructed documentary” – a visual essay employing computational experimentation as core source material.

Through this process the artist identifies the nature of neural networks as “diffractive” in the Haraway / Barad sense – that is the network provides a repository of disparate moments in time, “spacetimematterings” (Barad), that may be accessed and reconfigured into new patterns. In this work, the reconfigurations provide a haunting speculative insight into a road trip that could (never) be, and simultaneously indicate how the technology that runs the big data giants that shape our world might play a role in crafting our own individual stories.

Exhibitions

Human Data Interaction (HDI) Workshop: ‘Art, AI-created content, & industrial/cultural effects’, Presentation, Somerset House 2019

“So how is that working for you?” Exhibition, Goldsmiths University, 2019

“2POP||!2POP” Exhibition, Goldsmiths University, 2019