DANIELA SCHWABE - DEEP KIN
Daniela Schwabe (1984 NL) shows in her latest series DEEP KIN a number of special paintings that, just like in her previous series DEEP FAMILY, were created through a collaboration with artificial intelligence.
While the focus in the DEEP FAMILY series was mainly on the fascination for the German background in her family, in which the Second World War - and its aftermath - left an important mark, the DEEP KIN series focuses on photos from a more recent time.
Memories, (family) history and time span in general are an important part of Daniela Schwabe's work. By collaborating with artificial intelligence, she is able to convert a large amount of personal information into concrete images in DEEP FAMILY and DEEP KIN that reflect the research on memories. Personal childhood memories and family photos are linked to our collective memory. It is no longer clear who these memories belong to and to whom they belong. What makes a family family and what happens to our personal memories when they are distorted by an outsider? And what about friendship?
Together with designer Casper Schipper, Daniela trained a neural network with thousands of photos of friends from her own archive, taken over the past 25 years. The neural network sees patterns that we do not recognize ourselves and is able to compose new images from all that information that take surprising shapes. Daniela takes these generated portraits as a starting point and then transforms them into paintings, one of the oldest mediums for portraying people.
The painted series DEEP KIN depicts the passage of time; just as memories grow, distort and evolve over time, Daniela's painted portraits are concerned with the question of how recreating personal history simultaneously reflects the idea of an alternate reality, past and future.