内容摘要：On Thursday, for instance, a federal court briefly ruled that Trump had illegally exercised emergency powers to impose his sweeping slate of international tariffs, only for an appeals court to

On Thursday, for instance, a federal court briefly ruled that Trump had illegally exercised emergency powers to impose his sweeping slate of international tariffs, only for an appeals court to

So with this in mind, in 2022, Garcia and his team launched the Synthetic Memoriesto use AI to generate photographic representations of memories that were lost, due to missing photos, for instance, or never recorded in the first place.

“I don’t think there was an eureka moment,” Garcia says of the evolution of the idea. “I’ve always been intrigued by how documentaries reconstruct the past … our goal and approach were more focused on the subjective and personal side, trying to capture the emotional layers of memory.”For Garcia, the chance to recover such memories is an important act in reclaiming one’s past. “The fact that you have an image that tells this happened to me, this is my memory, and this is shown and other people can see it, is also a way to say to you, ‘Yes, this happened’. It’s a way of saying, of having more dignity about the part of your history that has not been depicted.”To create a synthetic memory, DDS uses open-source image-generating AI systems such as DALL-E 2 and Flux, while the team is developing its own tool.

The process starts with an interviewer asking a subject to recall their earliest memory. They explore various narratives as people recount their life stories before picking the one they think can be best encapsulated in an image.The interviewer works with a prompter – someone trained in the syntax that the AI uses to create visuals – who inputs specific words to build the image from the details described by the interviewee.

Nearly everything, such as hairstyles, clothing, and furniture, is recreated as accurately as possible. However, figures themselves are usually depicted from behind or, if faces are shown, with a degree of blurriness.

This is intentional. “We want to be very clear that this is a synthetic memory and this is not real photography,” says Garcia. This is partly because they want to ensure their generated images don’t add to the proliferation of fake photos on the internet.Informants were everywhere, and the circle of trusted individuals was small. “As you can imagine, this is no way to live – this was living in darkness, silence, fear, and repression,” Vallejo says.

“There were few of us – very few – who dared to move from silence to activism, which involved many risks.”Vallejo was imprisoned in 1970 for attempting to set up a labour union among SEAT employees, spending half a year in jail, including 20 days being tortured by Barcelona’s secret police. After another arrest in late 1971 and the prosecution demanding 20 years for what were then considered crimes of association, organisation and propaganda, Vallejo crossed the border with France in January 1972. He ultimately gained political asylum in Italy, where he lived in exile before returning to Spain following the first limited amnesty of 1976, which granted pardons to political prisoners after Franco’s death in 1975.

Today, Vallejo dedicates his time to human rights activism. He presides over the Catalan Association of Former Political Prisoners of Francoism, created in the final years of the dictatorship.He learned about synthetic memories through Iridia, a human rights organisation that collaborated with DDS to help visualise memories of police abuse victims during the regime in a central Barcelona police station.