In an attempt to grasp the full story of his deceased grandfather and his Indonesian heritage, Sander Coers turned to the artificial intelligence programme Midjourney. Feeding archival family photos into its system, he asked the programme to describe them, specifically listing their technical details such as dominant colour tones and type of camera, film and lens. Altering these descriptions allowed Sander to prompt the programme to create new images, yet maintain the exact visual look and feel of the family snapshots. Finally, by blending multiple A.I.-generated images together with the originals, he created a surprisingly intimate, genuine, yet completely fictional family album.
The way the photos are cropped stands out. Coers used an element of collaging when assembling the final images, in order to emphasise the constructed nature of the photographs, and ultimately, the constructed nature of one’s memory, too. POST alludes to the ‘afterlife’ of his grandfather, through the photo albums he left behind, as well as to the realm of post-photography: a space where images can be generated without the use of a camera.
next: Ricardo Nagaoka