Dor de Tara is an experimental fanzine that was born during the International Design Week in Graz, Austria. Its concept comes from within: "dor de tara" means "homesick" in romanian. I was inspired by the nostalgia I feel when revisiting photo albums from my childhood in Romania, before moving to Spain. I can't fully recognize those memories, so they appear as diffuse and somewhat strange memories. I wanted to play with this concept of nostalgia, the contrast between real and invented memories, and photography as a tool to evoke past and forgotten times.
For this I used Midjourney, an artificial intelligence that creates new images from existing ones. I wanted to explore how to use it in an ethical way, without using content from other artists. Therefore, what I did was collect photographs from my childhood and merge them using AI without involving any additional prompts, so as not to condition the appearance of the image based on the style of another artist; thus, the AI relies solely on the selected photographs (my own photographs) to create a new one.
These images manage to generate in the viewer a feeling that something is not right, even if they do not know what. At first glance they seem normal, but they have errors and peculiarities caused by the AI's own algorithm.
I used mixed media such as collage and cutouts to emphasize that feeling of strangeness. The fanzine consists of a cover, back cover and 4 spreads, each of them tells a short story that the viewer has to decipher with the graphic elements that appear. The last sheet acts as a binder of materials since the “photo album” is not yet completed, there are still photographs to be placed. I wanted to leave an open ending that could give rise to new stories.
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