Craft Project

thispersonisnotdead

n the early days of generative image models, research projects like Philip Wang's «This Person Does Not Exist» posed the uncanny valley of AI-generated portraits: people who do not exist. The negation, "this person does not exist", does not negate the possibility that they could; it simply states that they do not. This project plays with the same inverted logic. This person is not dead, because we trained post-mortem, our custom model built on NVIDIA's StyleGAN3 architecture, on thousands of images sourced from cultural archives worldwide: post-mortem portraits, forensic photography, vanitas, memento mori, funerary iconography. Images of dead people and works about dead people. By using artificial intelligence to revive those characteristics, those faces, those textures, that aesthetic of death, the work speaks about death in a digital environment: its perception, its conception, and its processing through a neural network. Through two networks, in fact: the generator and the discriminator that make up the GAN, in dialogue with each other to produce images that never existed and will never recur. Every frame is unique. The artist has no control over what the network produces; after training, the AI creates freely. The name post-mortem designates a repeatable, time-reactive format: a growing dataset and an increasingly specialised artificial intelligence, capable of generating new volumes of the work.