NOSTos in ancient Greek means the return journey of the soldiers who fought in the Trojan War to their countries of origin. In its etymon it encapsulates many different nuances diverse, including the fatigue of return, the absence of the passate and the expectation and hope in returning to take refuge in what has made us happy. It is no accident that from the word nòstos we derive the word nostalgia. In response to nostalgia and therefore the need to remember, man has used photography as a means of freezing in time personally relevant and to be able to recall them whenever nostalgia took over. Here we come to the question main question of this project: in recent years we have viewing AI generating perfectly real, sometimes hyper-real, images.
Would it therefore be possible to regenerate my memories through an AI? Starting from some family photos, the project attempts to reinsert into backgrounds that have been more or less constant over time the only variables that are impossible to replicate through photography, the loved ones exactly as they were when the reference family photos were taken. Obviously this is a challenge lost at the outset, but this creates a reflexion on the role of "traditional" photography vs to AI: this one draw on endless collective databases to create something new, humans imbue photography with that need to return somewhere, and to do so they use a database inaccessible to anything that does not come from deep within themselves,
memory.