Unpacified Futures
Cities can be read as accumulations of historical decisions, woven over time by those who inhabit them. This project inquires the machine about how it envisions the way a metropolis and its people might have taken form if Indigenous histories had continued without violent interruption, sustaining their own processes of invention, adaptation, and hybridization.
This work uses the visual language of fashion street photography to interrogate Diffusion Models on the ways the machine reads and re-interprets symbols and morphologies related to Indigenous peoples. The series becomes a re-imagining of urban style, as if these cultures continued and evolved to shape the city.
What emerges is uncanny yet celebratory at once, an archaeology of possible fashions that never came to be, but somehow still resonate. A glimpse into parallel streets.
Naming convention
Each image in the series carries a seed number as its title. The seed is the code used by the model to generate a specific variation, but here it becomes an identification number, echoing the ways we register, classify, and catalogue people.
