Reconstructing Destruction

AI's interpretations of wild fire memories

What happens when an AI is confronted not only with concrete descriptions of a scene, but with emotions, metaphors, comparisons, abstract concepts of all kinds? Is an AI capable of generating images that capture the subjective experience and associations of a person? How does an artificial intelligence imagine the multiple subjective memories of people who witnessed a catastrophe?

You can read more about the proyect (In German) here:

by Karen Byk & Daphné Yurttagul
for MA Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftskommunikation
at Universität der Künste (UdK) Berlin
April 2022

In January 2021, a large forest area in La Comarca Andina, Argentina, went up in flames. The fire lasted for several months and spread to many small towns, burning 54,000 hectares and leaving 314 homes destroyed and three people dead.
This forest fires have left traces both in the landscape of the region and in its inhabitants. It is these traces that we are searching for in this project, where we use AI to reconstruct the fire visually through the memories and testimonies of the people who experienced it.