GAN sequence made with images from a latent space trained on stills from 90 silent films (1908-1918). The category of this data set is "Landscapes (with people)" (1831 stills).

Created as a response to Elizabedsh's "A Woman Who Doesn't Exist", published in Helix Issue 09 (OBJKT#785644).

The hard contrasts of the image and its scratched texture reminded me of the chapter on optical interferences and their reception in early cinema from Yuri Tsivian's book Early Russian Cinema and Its Cultural Reception (1994).

"Let us take the ‘rain effect’ as an example. Every cinemagoer is familiar with the scratch marks on worn prints that show up as specks flickering vertically down the screen. In early films these were particularly troublesome. A 1916 technical manual explained this involuntary ‘animation effect’ as follows: ›Since…a scratch mark in the corner of the picture is rapidly followed by one in the middle or at the top, it looks as though they are dancing all over the place, sometimes in dense clusters, sometimes scattered all around the image. If there are a lot of these defects the screen will appear to be covered with a fine veil of flickering white specks, or a shower of ‘rain’.‹ The word ‘rain’ was both a technical term and a common metaphor; it was a minor trope of film reception. Film reviews often contained facetious ‘meteorological’ references; in a big country (...) spectators living in far-off regions often had to put up with poor second-hand copies. One (...) critic, who came across a showing of Cabiria (Italy, 1914) in a provincial cinema as late as 1917, wrote with mock surprise: ›One thing puzzled me: was the action taking place indoors or outside in the open air? There was torrential rain everywhere… It was explained to me that the picture was a second-hand one, and with second-hand pictures the actors are always getting soaked to the skin…‹"

As the woman in the portrait looks upwards, being "soaked" by a "rain" of scratches, I thought to picture what she might be looking at. As she doesn't exist, a sequence of abstract, cloud-like GAN imagery made from early cinema seemed fitting.

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