Burn From Absence
-
Dates2024 - Ongoing
-
Author
- Location Paris, France
Burn From Absence is an extension of the installation of the same name, revealing the process of creation through artificial intelligence and opening onto philosophical, scientific and historical questions concerning the duty of remembrance.
Burn From Absence is an immersive installation about the erosion of memory in the Vietnamese family of the visual artist. Like a river flowing upstream thanks to AI-generated images filling the blind spots of their story, she tries to retrace how her family came to want to forget ‘everything’ in order to achieve resilience.
This book is an extension of the installation, revealing the process of creation through artificial intelligence and opening onto philosophical, scientific and historical questions concerning the duty of remembrance.
It's an editorial object made up of different papers, the main one highly textured and matte on which the photographs will be printed; the other, like little words slipped between the pages, softer, sometimes transparent, allowing us to play with the superposition between real archives and images generated by AI.
I wanted to counterbalance the installation by highlighting the imperfect, artificial results of this tool, while at the same time emphasizing it - as it's the one printed in a very clear way - against the real archives. This highlights the viewer's questioning of and responsibility for what he or she considers more tangible than the other. As real memories are ephemeral, they seem on the verge of disappearing, replaced by false images that will never live up to the original. This forces us to play the “game of seven errors” and sharpen our eye for the innovative tool that is AI and how far can it really replace humanity.
The monochrome blocks are therefore dummies of what will belong to the second type of paper, and will contain different kinds of information: snatches of sentences, anecdotes, whose meaning escapes us like a revival of a lost memory; sometimes on a more matt paper, they will be extracts from interviews with AI researchers, philosophers and historians on the question of memory. For this reason, the subtitle of this part of Burn From Absence : "a dissection of fictional memories".
