ALL THE PLACES I HAVE LIVED - Phase II
This project is part of my ongoing practice based PhD research with RMIT school of Art and the second part of the project. In this research I look at notions of home and belonging for migrants such as myself who live in what Homi Bhabah describes as a third space. I also aim to explore how Artificial Intelligence as a tool be used to reveal something beyond the photographer’s gaze and how can it be used to reveal, explore and critique the identity of a place. Since I moved from Germany to Ho Chi Minh City for the first time in 2004 I have lived in 9 different neighborhoods across the city. In this project I aim to explore these neighborhoods. Each of them represents a different period and station of my life as a Western immigrant to Vietnam. This approach closely connects to the autoethnographic methodology I am applying in my research. By creating a collection of photographs for each of these neighborhoods and then using them with the DreamBooth plugin in Stable Diffusion (a form of generative AI) I am able to first train my own AI models and then create images of places that do not exist as such, but that could have been. In this way I not only create images that go beyond pure documentary but also touch the concept of false memories. What we see here is not real. And how could it be? To create an even deeper sense of distortion in the memories I employ glitch aesthetics.Each image gets infused with a memory of the place it represents. Through collaboration with ChatGPT I was able to create a tool in Python, called "Memory Infuser", that creates a glitch like effect in a JPG, based on a text input. It is important to note that the tool is set up in a way that only creates one specific output based on the text-image combination. If the text changes, the image changes. This is a collection of my false and distorted memories of Saigon in a roughly chronological order.