A.I. Works

A video that uses AI to reflect on time, death and memory as a fiction.

Memento vivi means “Remember to live” in Latin.  Grieving is a strange thing that comes back to you in waves. This year my mother would have been 80, yesterday in fact she would have been 80… and 30 years after her death I wondered how she would have aged.

In collaboration with an artificial intelligence (Deforum Stable Diffusion) I imagined some portraits of her, superimposing them and creating them from the longest video I have of her. It’s a 46 second sequence from 1983, shot by my father. All these AI portraits, these paintings, are like memories, reconstructions of reality, fictional lies… None really resembles her, and yet in each of them I find a little thing of my mother, an energy, a detail, a partial reincarnation of a possible Mother.  Time is relative, according to the emotions attached to the events, so I decided to encapsulate in these 46 precious seconds a whole potential life – as if it was carrying all of its essence. This goes against the traditional Memento Mori, fixing time forever. Memento vivi is a celebration of life, that keeps on transforming all of us.

Turn on the sound to hear Isabelle’s voice.