Photographic Structures (GAN) by Alejandro Cartagena

Since last year I have been feeding a network nothing but faces, each a fragment pulled from Mexico City’s discarded photographs of its inhabitants I've collected over the years. What came back was at once underwhelming and magnetic: half-formed visages that slip between presence and absence, as though the archive itself were reluctant to be reborn via these digital tools. bUt the photographic structure was still palpable in between these corrupt looking images. The failure cracked something open. If two centuries of photography have disciplined how we picture ourselves, what happens when a machine digests those trillions of exposures and regurgitates a face that never lived? Maybe, just maybe, in the blur between recognition and doubt, the GAN hints at another cartography of selfhood, a synthetic mirror where we might glimpse not who we are, but who the image, camera, algorithm, history, insists we could become. My first attempts at this project came in 2018-2020 where I manually dism