About “Ideal City” series
GenAI, like all media, has its own strengths and limitations. Currently, these tools excel at generating visuals of popular subjects and aesthetics, including simulating styles of many artists or making images that look like photographs of real scenes. However, they can struggle with unfamiliar concepts or aesthetics. When asked to create something rare or non-existent, AI tools frequently produce lower quality results or substitute more generic elements.
In my Ideal City image series, I deliberately exploit these limitations of AI. I use Midjourney AI image generation tool, adjusting its parameters to reduce its default "house style." This approach allows for more original results but introduces various imperfections. However, rather than viewing this behavior only as a constraint, I turn it into creative opportunities by coming up with a subject where these "mistakes" appear organic and logical.
For this series, I imagined architecture designs for a new USSR city, presented as models in 1960 (the year of my birth). This concept references the massive construction of apartment blocks across the USSR that begun in the late 1950s. These buildings, known affectionately as "#панельки" in Russian, symbolize today both failed communist utopia and nostalgia for multiple generations. In my images, typically pristine architectural models appear in a state of decay, as if showing how the buildings might look decades after construction. It's a retroactive look at the 1960s and my childhood in the USSR, viewed from 2024. Using AI as a "memory machine," I project the future state into the past.
The miniature scale of these imagined models also carries additional meanings. Like many artists, I'm drawn back to my childhood visual and spatial experiences. The small scale renders these memories particularly vulnerable and unstable. The physical imperfection and crudeness of the models, seemingly ready to be blown away, become metaphors for the vulnerability we feel when confronting our personal history.