Joan Fontcuberta / Pilar Rosado, PROSOPAGNOSIA, 2019

Prosopagnosia (memory pathology associated with the inability to remember faces) is a project carried out from the historical archive of photographs of a local Spanish newspaper active in the 30s, dedicated to public personalities of the time. This collection of portraits serves as input to train a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), an algorithm that develops a machine learning process to generate new faces from stock portraits (although it could be applied to any type of Photographs). The result is a new collection of photorealistic images of people who have never existed. The final images are convincingly photographic, but the focus is mainly on the wonderful sequence of failed attempts that review important steps in art history: Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Picasso, Bacon, Abstraction, etc.