This work uses the language of fashion street photography to interrogate Diffusion Models on the ways the machine interprets symbols and morphologies related to indigenous people resulting on a series of photos that reimagines urban styles as if indigenous cultures had continued to thrive and shape the cityscapes. Focused on New York—chosen for its personal significance and its status as one of the most photographed places, likely shaping most AI models used everywhere, these series explore a tapestry of styles that somehow in-between the Uncanny Valley, celebrate resilience and cultural fusion, while also examining how modern technology interprets Indigenous Peoples, being these series specifically focused in the peoples from the whole American Continent, from South to North.
After reckoning with the vast amount of images produced for this series ii felt he need for a tool to keep track of all these prompts and settings in a linear and publicly accessible way -like in a website- and realized there was nothing out there yet so i ended up building one myself.
The irony of all this is that right after i finished coding the main functionality (automatically reading prompt data from an image), the hard drive containing all my AI generations died. No time for backups. I may have fried it since i was running the models from the same drive. I’m not sure. All i have left now are the images on the website backend, some selections for a publication and the first physical manifestation of this series, made in 2023 for the Novelty2 exhibition—the images shown in this portfolio.
The web platform that resulted from this project is called promptlog (in a homage to fotolog) and I’ve now decided to open it for everybody who wants to join and use it to keep track/share their prompts. U can also choose to hide the prompt and show only the image if you are feeling secretive.