Micaelle Lages (ITP ’24), joined by Professor Isabella Valle (UFPB), will present their research, titled "From family albums to synthetic memories: gender, dissidences and visibilities" at the upcoming Synthetic Narratives Symposium at Stevens Institute of Technology. As panelists on the Post-Photography panel, they will discuss AI-generated artwork by contemporary  contemporary Brazilian artists Trojany, Gisele Beiguelman, and Mayara Ferrão, grounded by analysis in academic theories of photography, sociology, and visual culture.

About the Symposium: "Generative AI and immersive technologies are transforming the way we create, experience, and understand stories. This two-day symposium brings together leading artists, technologists, and thinkers to explore the cultural, philosophical, and creative potentials of this rapidly evolving field." The Symposium will take place in Hoboken, NJ on October 24 + 25th.

About her research:

From family albums to synthetic memories: gender, dissidences and visibilities

José van Dijck (2007) asserts that media and memory are not distinct entities, as memory is always mediated. Through media, memory can be enhanced, distorted, extended, or replaced. Modern culture has bestowed upon photography a strong documentary status, linking it to memory’s direct recording, even though it has always been a powerful tool for fabulation. In contemporary culture, AI-generated images can function both as tools of rupture and repair in relation to memory. They mediate access to narratives previously denied visibility – particularly of Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQIAPN+ communities, who have been historically silenced as protagonists, objectified in official archives, and excluded from family albums within photographic culture.

When photographic culture was established within an imperialist context (Azoulay, 2008), narratives by non-hegemonic subjects were not made visible in the public sphere. Women were assigned as producers and guardians of family memory (Valle, 2017), although some defied these norms, moving beyond the domestic sphere of production and circulation. Only recently have family albums and other private visual productions by women gained recognition as important contributions to collective memory, expanding the field beyond the “male gaze” (Mulvey, 1975). Today, they are recognized not only as spaces of technical and artistic experimentation but also as valuable memory archives.

Electronic media has been reshaping how societies remember, access, and represent the past (Urry, 2007). Now, in the age of genAI, our relationship with memory, identity, and visual representation is gaining new layers of complexity. Despite the relevant criticisms regarding the hegemonic biases in datasets, which inevitably shape these fabulative exercises, promptographies (Eldagsen, 2023) do not merely simulate the photographic past – they reimagine and stress the differences and gaps, providing us with more possibilities of resistance and creation. Vilém Flusser (1985) argued that the imagination behind new images reshapes subjectivity and memory, becoming a model for the future. According to the author, the ontological, ethical, and aesthetic distinctiveness of technical images lies in “the less probable they are, the more informative they become.”

This research turns to Brazilian women artists to explore how their dissident artistic practices are using genAI to challenge the normative frameworks of visual culture, reconstruct erased histories, and speculate on decolonial futures. We examine how promptographies are being mobilised as instruments of resistance and imagination. In Álbum dos Desquecimentos (“Un-forgettings Album”), Mayara Ferrão creates portraits that envision joyful memories of BIPOC women whose histories of affection were rarely documented before. Giselle Beiguelman’s Botannica Tirannica subverts the colonial and sexist taxonomy of plant species, generating fictional flora that reimagine nomenclatures of resistance. Trojany’s Morango do Nordeste ("Northeast Strawberry”) merges her grandparents’ portrait with generative processes, remixing synthesis and collages with the aesthetics of antique domestic photography often found in Brazilian peripheral homes.

Photography in itself was never a transparent index of reality but a constructed interpretation (Machado, 2007). Memory functions similarly – in flux, negotiated through power, mediation, and imagination. Post-photography reconstructs and expands even further into this idea of mediated existences: through AI creations, these artists are proposing emancipatory possibilities of remembering.