Prompted Absence

“Prompted Absence” is a generative art project that takes its starting point from documentary news photographs and subjects these images to a series of artificial transformations.

In the first stage, all human figures in the original images are erased using AI-based editing tools; what remains are only human-less landscapes, emptied spaces, and the physical traces of events. In the second stage, another AI system is asked to describe this altered image in words. This description becomes the trigger for a third process; hundreds of new images are generated from the same text.

By repeatedly applying this process to different news photographs, a vast field of synthetic images emerges in which events originally captured by humans are eroded, replicated, and reconstructed through AI. This field reveals the tension between the documentary image’s function as testimony and the AI’s capacity for generative simulation.

The resulting phantom images question what remains in the place where the human has been erased, and how memory, the event, and testimony are redefined by the machine.