2022-2023
The book of Seil
This might have been an album of an explorer from a century ago showing harsh Arctic landscape. Back then the Arctic was a different place than now, after decades of experiencing fierce effects of climate change that literally melt it away.
The photographs depict blended motifs and patterns found in XIX and early XX pictures of the Arctic landscape. Generative adversarial networks were trained on a curated dataset of ~400 photographs, taken by unknown photographers, deposited in an online database of Svalbard Museum. Dozen of thousands of iterations of the learning process of the networks produced thousands of images that were curated and reproduced using a classic analog process, including the darkroom printing.
The project is an attempt to recreate a memory of a place that has been profoundly changed and does not exist anymore. It also asks if the memories what we carry with us are real, or do we make them up ourselves? It questions the authorship of the photographs and plays with the definition of what we accept as a photograph in today's world.
I would like to thank Svalbard Museum for letting me work with their resources.