Latent Imaging and Imagining

Latent Imaging and Imagining is part of an autoethnographic artistic research project exploring chrononormativity (the social expectation that life should follow a normative timeline) from a nonconforming and subversive perspective. The work asks how one might access and re-imagine childhood memories through a careful and queer approach.

The photo series is based on the artist’s own childhood photographs. These images were altered using a commercial generative out-painting tool to selectively re-imagine male-coded aspects of the artist’s appearance. Some images were generated using only the simple prompt “girl”, while others required more specific prompts, such as “a girl with brown hair holding a bunny.” The resulting generated variations—or “latent images”—were then printed on Polaroid film.

Trans(-feminine) Temporality and Authenticity

This work is rooted in an instance of trans(-feminine) temporality, in which transness and processes of transitioning have enabled and positioned the artist outside a chrononormative biography and life schedule, where from a normative viewpoint childhood, adolescence and adulthood stand in temporally discontinuous relation towards each other: A friction that enables one to explore modes of becoming an embodiment of alternative spatiality and temporality, not determined by the constraints and implications of cis-heteronormativity and the gender binary. Besides the resulting joy, euphoria and pleasure though, this friction also causes certain stresses and dysphoria, such as the felt “loss” or inability of having been experiencing girlhood. Latent Imaging and Imagining sits right at the crack of this situation. By playfully layering generated imaginative imagery as latent versions of the artist's childhood photos and memories, the work is trying to balance and negotiate degrees of maintenance, disruption and repair: How can I can I revisit and reimagine the visual archive of my childhood, without falling into a personal revisionism that would just plainly overwrite the past with the present's agenda? What responsibilities emerge when messing with memory, given that memory is never purely individual, but always shared? And what nonconforming notions of authenticity may be the result, if the image is not thought of as an objective record of the past, but instead establishes a set of relationships from present towards a factual past that may involve many speculative pasts?

While the used image generating system was a playful way to get this project started in 2022, this work is not very interested in presenting big corporate generative so-called "AI" as an affirmative means of care. Quite contrary, this work aims to start a discussion around the ambivalence caused by radical biographical changes (like i.e. a sex and gender transition) in how they create a fragmentation of a before and an after. Whether or not this discontinuity should (or even can) be resolved?

Latency

Latency in the context of this work references not only a delay, but also the “virtual”, in the meaning of existing or “present but needing particular conditions to become active, obvious, or completely developed” [1]. A latent imaging and imagining therefore describes the practice of visualizing an imaginary that finds itself in the realm of the virtual and contingent - possible to become factual, but not (yet) unfolded.

Passing as a girl to an "AI"

An important critical moment in this work can be found in how the imaginary images take their form: Based on a dataset of millions of images labelled as "girl" [2], the used so-called "AI" tool generates images which the system considers as female-passing. The system uses a stochastic process to coming to terms with what it classifies as "girl", what might also be called a potential bias, considering it is not transparent what images specifically have been used. The idea of what passes as "girl" (used as a prompt) to the system, can be observed in the resulting images: A cute happy white blonde healthy middle-class-looking girl. Only adding more detailed descriptions to the prompts, such as "girl with brown hair", "a young girl in a t-shirt", led to better, more realistic results for the purpose of this work.

Lastly should be noted, one might think that the generated images, depicting a white girl by using only the prompt "girl", are resulting from the context of the input images, which actually contain the face of a white child. This could be true and probably is the reason in this case. Nevertheless, a quick experiment [3] of generating 40 images using only the prompt "girl" shows that this prompt mostly defaults to depictions of light-skinned girls, and more diverse image results are still an exception with the used tool.

2025 Update: A media-technological short-circuit

Following the queer latency of hybridizing past-present memory-desires, since 2025 the series of printed photographs is accompanied by digital screens that share the same format like the printed instant photos. Each screen shows latent animations in flux, a morphing that stays within in-between states, memories that are still ongoing, constituted by desires of the present, past and future; processes that are never really complete. The wall-drawing is mapping out this thought process meditating on memory and desire, intimacy, trans*feminine time and the resulting notion of what I like to call othered-self-othered. A second look at this work reveals how extractive big-tech platforms systems like generative "AI" have seeped into this exchange of memory and desire, self and other, claiming to provide a technological solution for something that might not have been a problem in the first place.