Long Short Term Memories (sketches from a garden in Argentina)

Ridler and Crespo, both listed by artnet as “pioneering artists” exploring AI’s creative potential, frequently collaborate to draw together their combined interests in nature and the history of photography. The piece, created using a dataset of only photographs both artists took on various trips to Argentina, is translated and retranslated using a variety of different AI models, from the analogue to the digital and back again. Presented here is some of this process - a number of polaroids of already synthetic images that were used for training and the resulting digital images. The artists believe that this iterative method, driven by AI, brings them close to the process described in Borges’ short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius where copies over time and cycles contain “a purity of line not found in the original”. It also draws parallels with the way that neuroscientists have discovered that the process of recalling a memory activates the same processes as the act of creating a memory - every time something is remembered it is also actively recreated. The duality of memory is combined in this work in the hazy blurry nature of polaroids and the crisp sharp detail of the digital.