The project The Mental Walk, refers to my series of works called The Walk, which I made over many years using the pinhole photography method.
The threat of a renewed pandemic and the fear of travel restrictions can bring traditional creative processes to a halt again. Fear of renewed isolation has forced the search for new ways to realize photographic ideas.
The Mental Walk project refers to my series of works called The Walk, which I realized over many years using the pinhole photography method.
The Mental Walk project is my mental walk, also known as the imaginative technique, is a method used to recreate in the mind images of places we have seen but want to bring back in detail. Deeply rooted in the psychovisual science of vision and philosophy of mind, this technique allows us to create visual hallucinations that can be both explicit and detailed.
With advanced diffusion models, we can already make use of what Vilem Flusser called the camera - a tool that mimics thinking.
In my new works, I bring places back from memory and expose the effect on a polaroid. Each photograph is unique.I record my favorite city of Shanghai from memory using prompts, whose movement, dynamics , multi-layered cascades of construction, allow me to feel the same emotions I felt when discovering this city with my pinhole camera.
I used two types of Diffusion Models: DALL·E 3 and Stable Diffusion 3 to generate the images. In the case of the 1st one I was looking for lighting effects that I remember very well from Shanghai from sunrises sunsets and cloudy days that have a rather specific lighting effect. In the case of the second one I could focus more on pulling out the details. The architectures in the pictures are more real.