London-Based Artist Uses Artificial Intelligence To Recreate Old Maltese Photos
Anna Ridler adds an incredible twist to old photos of Malta by using a form of technology called Generative Adversarial Network, which is a mixture of deep learning and artificial intelligence. This system forms up a narrative collection of images from the information it is given — producing abstract imagery of what it thinks the world around us looks like.
Anna told Lovin Malta “For Traces of Things I took photographs that showed historic Malta from a variety of sources, some primary, some second hand, some public, some private, to create my own dataset of what the island has looked like.”
In order for this to work the first AI’s process is that to produce realistic images, while the second AI is programmed to figure out whether or not the images are real — producing images that are almost unrecognisable from the original images, giving them a surreal finish. The first AI eventually learns how to mimic real photos so that the second one would not be able to distinguish them from actual photographs. This is where our memory comes into play, as the viewer is asked to add the missing pieces.