I wasn’t there, a DALL·E images collection

In 2022, I began experimenting with AI image generation, more as a curiosity than as a clear artistic direction.

These early explorations became a series of memory-like photographs that I later gathered into the video triptych titled I can’t remember, shown in March 2023 at the NFT Factory as part of the group show 100% AI – That Doesn’t Exist.

The generated images with DALL·E looked like fragments from a memory archive, suspended somewhere between the 1950s and the 1990s: imagined family gatherings, garden walks, quiet parties. Red faces, blurred smiles, leftover food, and wet sidewalks. The original images are now being minted in the collection I wasn’t there, on objkt.

I was trying to reimagine what my own family might have looked like before I was born, or at a time when I was too young to remember. What emerged was an AI version of white Western middle-class life. Comfortable, expressive, privileged. A world that felt warm and familiar, and unaware of itself. Appearing safe, while being quietly shaped by dominant structures I could not yet name.

The people in these images seemed capable of love, vulnerability, and genuine care. Some moments felt tender and intimate. Others, strangely bitter. The nights were loose and uncontained. The sunlight on their faces, almost totalitarian.