This is How I See the World: Hallucinated Histories: No Through Road

Hallucinated Histories

This special series of videos is reserved for the most interesting series of outputs from my "This Is How I See The World" collection.

After hours and hours of examining "expanded generation" of street images, I select a combination of rarer and more common generative compositions and sequence them into a false historical narrative of one place.

These frames appear to show a loosely coherent story. In actual fact, all these images were generated by AI as being equally likely depictions of the world around the central photo.

"This Is How I See The World" will be an ongoing collection examining different AI algorithms over time.

**This Is How I See The World"

In "This Is How I See The World" I have made street photos from around Sydney, Australia, and invited AI algorithms to "expand" them without prompts.

This collection puts the focus on specific AI generation at specific times in history and shows us, the human viewer, what each AI imagines our world to be like.

By grounding each piece in the real world and letting the image be the only prompt the AI receives, we are invited into an AI dream of reality.

Do we recognise what we see in this dream? Do we like it, dislike it - or experience some other feeling?

Each piece includes a human hand to remind us that we are the ones who have agency, creativity and can "touch" the world around us.

At the same time we are trusting AI more and more to interpret the world and help us make sense of it. Seeing the world through AI perspectives, and revealing how that changes over time, is a powerful way to reflect on our relationship to these tools and reality.

The composition of these images references the habit of holding up old photos of current locations to show how they have changed over time.

In this case, we hold up the present reality to show how our tools imagine the places we live.