The FUTURE MEMORY series combines the research and usage on artificial intelligence (AI) with historic photographs of the Cold War. 

Together with Casper Schipper, Daniela developed an AI system that learned her 'style' by being fed with images from Daniela's previous painting series. The AI system thus created an own imagery style and was then again fed with another material, that is the historic iconic photography. Daniela used these AI-images of the Cold War as basis for her new body of work. This new series deals on the one hand with the questions of authenticity of authorship and on the other with the truth of photographic material, that is still in such a way acknowledged by people, while at the same time never been more aware of its unreliability. Through this approach, Daniela Schwabe emphazises the potential and challenges of new technological developments such as AI that have brought the artificial and the human closer together than ever, creating neural networks that can be creative, intuitive and unpredictable.


FUTURE MEMORY

In the GOLDEN series painting on gold functions as a metaphoric performance of value and trust. 
For an exhibition at De Nederlandsche Bank in 2016, together with Marcel Broodthaers and James Lee Byars, Daniela became interested in working with gold as material. 
Daniela considers painting as a depiction of what we think about as true, how we arrive at images and the memory of historical narrative and value.


GOLDEN SERIES

In the RAINBOWSERIES Daniela looked at how major historic events such as the Second World War affect society on the level of imagery; certain images stick with us through time and become icons in the collective memory. As a starting point she fragmentized and combined these historical images with domestic photographs of her (German) family from the same era into painted collages. 

RAINBOWSERIES

DEEP FAMILY (2020) is a series in collaboration with designer Casper Schipper. It deals with personal history, family, identity, memory and artificial intelligence (AI).

Looking at the family as a system we are born in, burdened with the history attached to that particular family, it is a system we cannot escape and that defines our behavior with a logic and rules of its own. The way we perceive our family history relies in part on the tangible proof of photography; family albums with photos of marriages, holidays, birthdays, cities lived in, old friends and newborns. The family photo album forms a set of inflexible data that we return to as proof of what happened in our past. What if you would be able to change the visual archive of your family in the instant of a mouse-click?
Within the project we investigated the visual recollection of my family’s photo archive by using AI.

Casper and I developed a neural network that generates portraits of individuals and, subsequently, group portraits of imaginary family members. To start, we collected imagery from my family archive, inserted it in the network and trained the algorithm to understand the typical features of these portraits. A neural network, unlike a family, has a starting point which is known and fixed, from there on it starts developing, expanding, learning and remembering. When this particular process is done, the AI can generate new imagery based on this archive and therefore changes the unshakeable fundament.

I translated the new family portraits created by the AI into paintings. One of the oldest mediums to portray people, it reflects the passing of time, just as families grow, deform and develop over generations. 
The paintings were shown after my residency in Leipzig at the Massiv Archiv in July 2020.

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Daniela Schwabe