Sofy Yuditskaya: Those Who Were Living

A series of videos where we use AI to generate extinct animals in disappearing landscapes in the Arctic, Amazon, and Kerala. Once we and our ecosystems are all gone maybe only the AIs will dream of the past. Barthes’ famous proposal is that photography is characterized by the presence of death. To Barthes a photograph stopped time, and while the world goes on living the photograph is the embodiment of an emanation from beyond the pale. In “Those Who Were Living” we extend this concept to a series of photographs, but insert, like Durer’s Rhinoceros, an image he drew from description, animals already gone, soon to be gone (on the endangered species list), and only glimpsed in the deranged fantasies of dying sailors in the Arctic and other remote parts of the world visited only by the “explorers” (read exploiters) of capitalism and the mercantile classes, there to extract from the environment what gains they could. The title is from T.S. Eliot's and Ezra Pound's "The Wasteland."