He looks like you

The pictures in this project depict my father Giorgio and my son Ulisse playing and sharing moments and experiences. They are, however, false memories. My father died five years before my son was born and therefore they could never meet.

The pictures in this project depict my father Giorgio and my son Ulisse playing and sharing moments and experiences. They are, however, false memories. My father died five years before my son was born and therefore they could never meet. In 2023, on the tenth anniversary of Giorgio's passing, in a moment of despair, I wanted to create this small family album combining authentic and artificial photographs, the latter created based on real ones.

These images were generated with the use of artificial intelligence (A.I.), creating moments that never existed, in places that will never be reached. An attempt to find consolation and overcome the frontiers of existence through art and technology, generating images that fuse illusion, dream and memory.

The decision to use A.I. obviously deprived me of complete control over the final result: after providing input with some photographs and the textual request to represent Giorgio and Ulisse, I entrusted a large part of the creative process to the software, which processed the data in a completely autonomous way, including misunderstandings, errors and imperfections.

In the artificial photographs, generated hundreds of times, Giorgio and Ulisse often look very different, but this did not prevent me from recognising them thanks to some realistic details, such as facial features, wrinkles, my father's corpulent physique or something else.

All this generated a sort of distance between me and the images generated (certainly more than there would have been if I had resorted to photomontages or illustrations), in which authenticity and unpredictability seem to blur, placing them in a limbo between reality and fiction. This is why I was able to surrender myself to the faith in those images, even if only for a few moments, and derive some form of benefit from them.