These threats are exacerbated by Afghanistan’s acute humanitarian needs, soaring unemployment, and diminishing international aid.
Over the years, the studio has grown into a 30-person team of experts in varied disciplines such as psychology, architecture, cognitive science, journalism and design. The studio has collaborated with diverse institutions such as museums, prisons and churches, as well as the likes of the United Nations, and uses technology to bring “emotions and humanity” to data visualisation.Then, in around 2019, with the rise of generative artificial intelligence – a model of machine learning that uses algorithms to create new content from data scraped from the internet – the team began to explore image-generating technology, following the release of ChatGPT.
As they did, Garcia thought of the grandmother from Syria and how this technology might help someone like her by constructing images based on memories.He believes that memories – captured through records like photographs – play an integral role in connecting generations.“Memories are the architects of who we are. … It’s a big part of how social identities are built,” he says.
He also likes to cite Montserrat Roig, a Catalan author, who wrote that the biggest act of love is to remember something.But in the past, people had fewer opportunities to document their lives than their mobile phone-wielding contemporaries, he says. Many experiences have been omitted or erased from collective memory due to lack of access, persecution, censorship or marginalisation.
So with this in mind, in 2022, Garcia and his team launched the Synthetic Memories
to use AI to generate photographic representations of memories that were lost, due to missing photos, for instance, or never recorded in the first place.Clandestine assemblies
The team was particularly interested in telling stories of civic activists who have played a key role in different social movements in the city over the last 50 years, including those concerning LGBTQ and workers’ rights. While initially the focus was not on the dictatorship era, it “naturally brought us to engage with people who, by the historical circumstances, were activists against the regime,” Dordas explains.One of them was 74-year-old Jose Carles Vallejo Calderon.
Born in Barcelona in 1950 to Republican parents who faced oppression underGeneral Francisco Franco