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15C // A Gothic Attempt at Recreating Theaters by Hiroshi Sugimoto

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A Gothic Attempt at Recreating Theaters by Hiroshi Sugimoto "The Machine Recalls a Canon" 2500 x 1833 px, .png 2022 // For this little exercise in post-photography, I attempt to recreate iconic photographs using new artificial intelligence algorithms that generate images from text prompts, made possible thanks to advances in natural language processing models like GPT-3. This photograph was mediated through Midjourney's AI Bot on Discord and is computationally generated. This series is dedicated to Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote. In recreating the canon from digital scratch, we can consider the fragility of our collective memories, we can also reconsider the canon in and of itself. What deserves to be called forth back into existence and why? "Theaters" is the culmination of a 40-year-long project by photographer and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto that began in the late 70s with a smuggled large-format camera in St Mark's Cinema in the East Village. Each photograph contains a movie played in movie theaters around the world, some venues are historic, some abandoned, some are outdoors, but all share the glowing white screen. It's a rare feat to collapse both time and space in a single image, but Sugimoto says it best himself: "I was thinking a great deal about the invention of photography. A photograph fixes dead reality in the form of an afterimage. But when you are shown a series of those same afterimages, dead reality seems to come back to life — that is what a movie is … To watch a two-hour movie is simply to look at 172,800 photographic afterimages. Through sheer excess, the dead afterimages seem to come alive again. Since ancient Egyptian times — no, since the birth of civilization itself — the human race has been fascinated by the idea of resurrection. I wanted to photograph a movie, with all its appearance of life and motion, in order to stop it again. What I felt was a sense of vocation: I must use photography as a means to shut away the ghosts resurrected by the excess of photographic afterimages." For Reference, from the Artist's website: https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/new-page-7 May these links survive the tests of time <3 // // Artwork by Sabato Visconti // www.sabatobox.com // @sabatobox on Twitter //

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