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 images of this project portray my father Giorgio and my son Ulisse while playing and sharing moments and experiences. But these are false memories. My father passed away five years prior to my son’s birth so they never got to meet. In 2023, tenth anniversary of Giorgio’s death, during a phase of discouragement, I wanted to create this small family album that combines authentic and artificial photographs, the latter created based on the real ones.

Those images have been generated with the use of artificial intelligence (AI), creating moments that never existed, in places that will never be reachable. An attempt to find solace and to overcome the boundaries of existence through art and technology, generating images that blend illusion, dream and memory.

The choice to use AI has obviously deprived me of the complete control over the final outcome: After supplying some photographs and the textual request to represent Giorgio and Ulisse, I have entrusted much of the creative process to the software that has processed all data in a completely autonomous way, including even misunderstandings, errors and flaws.

In the artificial photographs, generated hundreds of times, Giorgio and Ulisse seem to be very different, but this did not prevent me from recognizing them thanks to some realistic details, such as facial features, wrinkles, the corpulent physique of my father or even more.

All this has produced a sort of distance between me and the images generated (definitely more than there would have been if I had applied to photomontages or illustrations), in which authenticity and unpredictability seem to become hazy, placing them in a limbo between reality and fiction. The generation of images, with the software I used, takes place gradually before one's eyes, somewhat reminiscent of the development of analogue photographs. For these reasons, I've been able to abandon myself to faith towards those images, even for just few moments, and have back a form of relief from them.