SEEING AGAINST SEEING
“Seeing against seeing”, is an artist book made in collaboration with Teun van der Heijden and Anti-Krieg Museum, Berlin. This book is one of several outcomes of Silent Hero, a visual research and a historical investigation into my grandfather’s memory of WWII that he never spoke about. At the core of this artist book is an anti-war manifesto, “War Against War!” published in 1924 by German anarcho-pacifist Ernst Friedrich. To devoid the image of war from glory and honor, Friedrich collected photographs from WWI depicting the horror and ugliness of war, pledging to all lands and mankind to stop the war by exhibiting photographic evidence of the horrifying aftermath. To recreate my grandfather’s experience at war I trained Generative Adversarial Neural Networks (GAN) on a dataset that consisted of thousands of portraits of soldiers posing in a studio or in a field. After training, the images that GAN model produced resemble humans, yet appearing disfigured and nightmarish and carrying striking resemblance to the images found in the original book. One hundred years after the first edition of the book, unlike Friedrich’s photo collection presented as evidence, synthetic images that I created with the machine, present themselves as war photography without evidence that results from credible witnessing. It is here where AI’s intelligence proves to be not solely statistical, but psychological – the face of the war is grotesque. In “Seeing against Seeing”, the convergence of technology separated by a century creates a dialectic centered on the act of seeing, visualizing conflict and cyclical cadence of histories.
Krieg Dem Kriege by Ernst Friedrich 2001 1980-1986 edition
51 original photopolymer photogravure on Stonehenge 250gsm Warm White paper
102 sheets of vellum
Mylar cover with UV printed title
Stamp book from Ukraine
Reproduciton of a postcard from Naum Lipkin, my granduncle who disappeared in WWII
Original polaroid
2mm steel welded book case
2mm steel book stand
Artist Book Edition: 24 + 2 AP
Seeing Against Seeing is shortlisted for Dummy Award ‘24.
Upcoming exhibitions: FOAM Museum “Missing Mirror” May 31 2024, Amsterdam, NL
