Fill in the gaps of an archive with extinct, forgotten, or undocumented species
Inspired by: Linda Dounia
Description of the work:
Generative AI tools like DALL*E have been trained on millions, or even billions of pieces of data. ChatGPT has scraped and made its way through almost the entire internet. Because these tools are trained on content that already exists, it can be a challenge to generate something new, something that doesn’t yet quite exist. Once Upon a Garden is a speculative archive by artist and designer Linda Dounia, imagining critically endangered and extinct flora for which few or no records exist. Using AI as a kind of time machine, Dounia reanimates these lost species through fragmented data, creating 50 emergent, speculative plants that trace the evolving capabilities of AI image synthesis. Her work reflects a broader practice rooted in questioning technocapitalism, where memory, identity, and algorithmic agency converge to explore excluded ways of being and imagining new possibilities
Quote: “To be able to fill gaps in the world’s collective memory with synthetic memory is a unique opportunity that AI offers today.”
Links:
https://lindarebeiz.com/
Assignment:
- For this exercise, choose a species (a plant or an animal) from your local environment.
- Research the history of this species: how long has it existed, and what visual records are available? You can use this website to help you in your search: https://www.iucnredlist.org/search
- Collect as many existing visual records of your species as you can find going back as far in time as possible. You can use photographic records from the internet (Wikimedia Commons), photographic records from physical archives, herbarium records, encyclopedic records, and academic records.
- Mark each image with the year that it was registered.
- Review the collection and see what information is missing. How far back in time do the images go? Is there a gap in the archive due to lack of record keeping or destruction of parts of the archive?
- Upload 3 images from your archive to ChatGPT and ask them to create a visual documentation for your species based on information you might be missing, for example an image of your species from 200 years ago or from another geographic location.
- After completing your archive, take a step back and review it as a whole.