Dads & Mums
The day I missed my photo, an AI corrected it for me
2023
We have undeniably entered a new era where all types of media can now be generated by artificial intelligence. This new era of creation not only upsets the status of the author but also our ways of thinking about creation, of perceiving information, of detecting the true from the false.
At the end of the 1980s, as a child, I took my very first photograph with a rudimentary silver camera that I had to assemble myself. I was on vacation in the port of La Rochelle, I took pictures of my parents, I took my first shot. A few days later, the development of the film reveals a faded photograph that could be described as a failure. My parents appear literally decapitated, a "severed head" photo. This image would certainly never have existed today.
While playing with the tools of current image generation, I remembered this first personal photographic gesture and its singular aspect. More than 30 years later, in order to compensate for my clumsy gesture, I asked an artificial intelligence program to reconstitute the out-of-frame part of my photograph along with the "Dad & Mum" prompt.
Not without humor, the installation Dads & Mums exposes 100 portraits of a man and a woman who then appear as plausible faces. A dialogue between two eras and two processes of image making operates. Here the singularity of the archive, the material document, the proof of a past time rubs shoulders with the generative, the fake and the immaterial which no longer has any limits.
The image of the couple, of the association of two beings in this image is also at work. How does this program constitute pairs? Does it associate faces between them? With what logic, what intentions? Will I recognize my parents there?
