In his undertaking ‘One other America’, artist and photographer Phillip Toledano makes use of synthetic intelligence to assemble a fictional, but hauntingly acquainted, historical past of america.
The collection is comprised of AI-generated pictures that mimic the visible type of Forties and Fifties images. Toledano particularly selected this period as a result of it was a time when images was broadly perceived as an plain document of the reality, creating a strong pressure between the medium’s historic authority and the fabricated content material of the pictures.
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The photographs are each recognizable and unusual, depicting scenes of mid-century American life infused with surreal, not possible parts that problem the viewer’s notion of actuality. Toledano refers to this technique as “historic surrealism,” utilizing AI to convincingly rewrite the previous with unsettling distortions. The undertaking serves as a pointy commentary on our up to date “post-truth” world, the place info have develop into subjective and conspiracy theories can flourish.
As Toledano himself explains, the arrival of AI implies that each lie can now be furnished with convincing visible proof, resulting in a state the place “every thing is true, and nothing is true on the similar time”. The gathering of pictures, accompanied by brief tales from New Yorker author John Kenney, was revealed as a guide in 2024, cementing One other America as a essential examination of how expertise is reshaping our understanding of historical past and actuality.