AI-based generative image production systems in the artistic problematisation of the past: the thematisation of memory and temporality in

Abstract

This text analyses how generative AI systems are being employed in current artistic practice to question certain historical visual narratives, creating representations that challenge some conventional perceptions of the past and thus opening up new perspectives on the experience of temporality. In this regard, special emphasis will be placed on some artistic projects based on generative historical photography practices. These are works that develop new ways around ‘archival aesthetics’ (Sekula in October 39:3–64 1986; Buchloh in Deep storage. collecting, storing and archiving in art [Exhibition catalog]. P.S.1, Nueva York, 1999; Guasch in Arte y archivo, 1920-2010. Genealogías, tipologías y discontinuidades. Akal, Madrid, 2015, etc.) by producing visual archives that do not exist or are alternatives to others. We will therefore analyse works that critically examine how these generative systems can contribute to a revision and re-evaluation of the past, as well as to the problematisation of the ways in which photography has been used for the historical record. These poetics invite subtle refections on the role of the visual archive in the processes of shaping subjectivity and personal and communal identity. In the fnal part of the text, we will deal with the study of some artists who, through appropriationist strategies and remakes assisted by generative AI models, revise artistic works from the past, specifcally from the photoconceptualism of the 1970s. In these strategies, the thematisation of the relations between photographic register and temporality also plays a leading role.