RETRACING MUNDANES - Have I Lived Here Before?

This research project rediscovers different places I lived by training AI image generation models on curated datasets of mundane photo snapshots from my everyday routines. As an architect and digital artist, I have been chasing radical ideas of virtual and physical spaces. While dedicating my passion to studio works and inspiration trips, I rarely connected my imagination with the mundane places I lived throughout my journey across China, the US, Japan, and Europe. These places exist as fragmented memories captured by thousands of everyday snapshots from my commuting, shopping, weekend hangouts, and evening walks. On the other hand, I find their mundaneness strangely resonating with the speculative ideas of my artistic journey.

What are my hidden impressions of these places?
Have they been shaping my imagination?
Can I find unexpected inspiration behind their mundaneness?
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What if AI randomly remix things from my fragmented memories to reimagine the place?

[ Click to Switch the Snapshots ]

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...cycling under the metrorail everyday...
[Trained on 50 photos from Miami, USA, 2012 - 2017]

...walking across the socialist housing blocks everyday...
[Trained on 35 photos from Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 2023]

...cycling along the railway in rice fields everyday...
[Trained on 50 photos from Nara, Japan, 2024]

...roaming along the Charles River Esplanade everyday...
[Trained on 100 photos from Boston, USA, 2018 - 2020]

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Wondered between Tokyo's train stations everyday in 2017?
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Cycled across Zhengzhou's old neighborhoods everyday in 2012?
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Been living in Helsinki since 2023?
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...to be updated...

As an open-ended research, the project explores different methods of data curation, AI training, and image generation to retrace mundaneness. Current experiments train Stable Diffusion XL models with 30-100 captioned snapshots for each place. Then, I generate hundreds of textual prompts with random combinations of 3-5 keywords from the training image captions to visualize alternative and often unexpected imagery of the place. The next steps will introduce my speculative design as additional data input to reconnect the radical impulses between the imagined and mundaneness of my artistic journey. Stay tuned for updates!