DHub | Disseny Hub Barcelona

CITIZEN OFFICE OF SYNTHETIC MEMORIES A project by Domestic Streamers Curator: Domestic Streamers with Jose Luis de Vicente DHub | Disseny Hub Barcelona 17/05/24 - 29/09/24 What is a memory? How is it shaped, and how does it change with time? What it we could turn any of our memories in an image that we could hold in our hand? For the last 2 months we have been running at DHub | Disseny Hub Barcelona an experimental municipal service: the Citizen Office of Synthetic Memories. Every visitor can book a 1-hour session to recover a personal memory that they cherish, and reconstruct it visually with AI tools. Subjects sit in these completely private sessions with an interviewer and a “prompter”. While the interviewer asks them to describe in detail a memory that is important to them, the prompter produces sketches on a modified version of Stable Diffusion, trained with local historical imagery. Together, they discuss each image to suggest modifications, and as they modify it and give it focus, the value of each memory becomes more clear, and sometimes more cathartic. For many participants it is an extremely emotional experience. This methodology has been developed during the last 2 years by Domestic Streamers in different workshops exploring the applications of AI visual tools for Reminiscence Therapy. The goal is never to produce a photorealistic picture, but to explore this blurry shifting space of indefinition, suggestive enough to be recognized and produce an emotional response, but not so detailed that precision becomes an issue. We want to capture the forest, not the trees. For this presentation we have turned this methodology into a speculative institution headquartered at DHUB, the Citizen Office for Synthetic Memories. The room evokes spaces of bureaucracy that are filtered thrugh our memories; a certain feel of what an administrative facility feels like, overlapping objects and archiving devices from the last few decades. Around 300 different citizens will have produced memories during the run of the project in Barcelona.