During the 2013 migration crisis, Pau Garcia, one of the founders of the creative studio Domestic Data Streamers, was in Athens collaborating with an NGO that helped Syrian families. In the course of a conversation, a grandmother told her something that would make her think about the value of memories and the role of images in their preservation: “I am a refugee now, but my grandchildren will be one for a long time. We have lost our photo albums, they will not even know what the streets where they grew up were like.” That story lit the flame of an extraordinary project, Synthetic Memories, which takes advantage of generative artificial intelligence to recreate memories that were never documented or were lost forever and which now arrives in Barcelona in the form of a Citizen Office where anyone who wants it, prior Request time and day until July 27, you will be able to recreate moments from your personal biography in images.
In the waiting room located in the CUB, the “cub” or satellite space of the Disseny Hub (DHub) designed for experimentation and research projects, in the words of its artistic director, José Luis de Vicente, Núria’s voice can be heard, 88 years old, evoking how 70 years ago he and his classmates threw a statue of Franco down the stairs at the UB. Or Xavi’s, trying to capture the moment she first saw her little sister. Both, after a meeting with an interviewer (maximum one hour) and a prompter who gives instructions to an AI, were able to visualize those undocumented experiences that were part of their memories and take them home in print.
“They are not photographs but abstract images in which faces appear obscured, and that is because we use old AI systems, some would say obsolete, for two reasons. On the one hand, to generate imperfect images that cannot be confused with real photographs and, on the other, because an unfinished image allows our imagination to complete it,” says Pau Garcia. “The difference with many of the projects that are being done with AI is that while those serve to imagine utopian futures or predict dystopian realities, this one precisely uses it to recover a lost past so that it does not fall into oblivion,” he points out. part Natalia Santolaria, creative director of Domestic Data Streamers, a team of designers and researchers who transform complex data and information into narratives, experiences and artistic installations.
Synthetic Memories is much more than an exercise in nostalgia. In fact, it started two years ago, in 2022, with the purpose of exploring the domain of generative AI technologies within social transformation initiatives. “The spaces in which we have seen that the project can be useful are, on the one hand, those in which there has been a forced migration and visual memories have been lost. People who have suffered a war, a natural disaster or some type of political persecution. Situations in which hard drives, family albums, telephones have been destroyed or have been abandoned in flight and with them a personal memory is lost that affects several generations,” says Garcia, who have the support of the University. from Toronto or British Columbia, among others.
At the moment, they have put it into practice in the Born Retiro neighborhood in São Paulo, with migrants from Brazil, Bolivia and Korea. The other area, in which they have also been involved, is therapeutic, experiencing the positive impact that synthetic memories can have on the progression of degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or senile dementia.
As they are generated, the images from the Synthetic Memories Citizen Office will become part of an exhibition at CUB, forming a kind of collective memory of the people of Barcelona. The proposal also includes several projects by artists who work with AI around memory and provides an instruction manual so that everyone can generate their own images at home.
