Once Upon A Garden is a speculative archive of critically endangered and extinct flora that we have little to no records of, and therefore no way to remember. In this project, Dounia uses AI as a time machine to go back in time and piece together data we didn’t bother recording using data that we did record. To be able to fill gaps in the world’s collective memory with synthetic memory is a unique opportunity that AI offers today. Between 2021 and now, Once Upon A Garden has speculated on what the flora population in West Africa (where Dounia is from and lives) might have looked like decades ago using increasingly faster and more refined models. The resulting body of work, while increasingly more photo-realistic as AI became more powerful over the years, cannot be mistaken for reality due to the thin and fragmented data available for training. Global efforts to record disappearing biodiversity have not been consistent across time and geographies.
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