Slides and Alternative Pasts

Larcher’s work, AI and the Art of Historical Reinterpretation (2022-2024), revolves unambiguously around ‘past reality’. Here she develops alternative pasts through a series of slides. The project aims at highlighting the contributions to history made by FLINTA, a German acronym standing for ‘women, lesbians, intersex, non-binary, trans and agender people’, and often suppressed in traditional narratives. For that purpose, Larcher used AI to effect replacements with respect to historical groups and individual portraits. 

In contrast to the series Baumeisterinnen (2018), in which the replacements of the heads of male architects with those of women architects were done by hand and remained visually evident, in AI and the Art of Historical Reinterpretation, the visual manipulation is almost invisible. The series is humorous nonetheless. With some pictures, we recall the original, while others appear familiar without our being able to identify their reference; we see a third group for the first time. The artist’s aim is to activate the sense of varied possibility in the heads of viewers, and thereby to allow them to imagine an alternative past and hence a different future. But the work also has to do with the future in another sense, namely inasmuch as Larcher reacts with this series to her investigations regarding ‘algorithmic biases’. This refers to the tendency, proceeding from AI, to produce biased outputs from distorted training data. Before the large AI companies began to work against these biases, most AI models generated, in response to such inquiries as ‘president’, only images of White men, whereas terms like ‘nurse’ were systematically rendered as female.

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