PILAR ROSADO
ART & RESEARCH 

PROSOPAGNOSIA

Prosopagnosia is a complaint that affects perception and memory, so that it is difficult or impossible to recognize faces. The project began with the creation and publication of a photobook under the same title that consists of a 21 foot-long (7 meters) leporello. On the “recto” side are original portraits of people who were well-known in the 1920s, found in the files of journalist Alonso Bonet, from the daily paper “La Prensa”, distributed in Spain between 1921 and 1936. It consists of a curious collection of very varied newspaper cuttings which they used when they had to publish an article about some celebrity. 

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On the “verso” side, with a glossy finish suggestive of the screens of electronic devices, appears a sequence of portraits generated from these photographs by means of the GAN. The book captures the wonderful sequence of learning of the computer. It starts by generating images with the pixels ordered at random but, little by little, the system discovers the pattern associated with the faces and it improves the creations until it obtains photographically convincing images of people who never existed. Establishing an analogy with the morphogenesis of a living being, observing the failed images produced evokes for us important steps in the history of art, such as expressionism, cubism, surrealism, abstraction...
2019 
Photobook, video and photography