Speculative Memories: Artificial Intelligence in Urban Narratives

Abstract

This paper examines generative AI as a situated artistic way of exploring cities rather than producing objective urban representations. It reads Abandoned Fictions, Abandoned Future and Montevideo, 1983 in relation to an earlier work, Wind. It proposes latent derive as a movement through a model's learned visual conventions that can expose differences between statistically plausible urban imagery and lived, remembered and politically understood places.