Speculative Pasts: Generative AI and the Political Imagination of History

Abstract

Speculative Pasts is an artistic-research programme using generative AI to construct images and moving images of histories that cannot fully appear in existing archives. Through Montevideo, 1983, Abandoned Fictions, Abandoned Future, Hommage Numerique and La MASA, it examines how plausible yet invented images can question omissions, ideology and the mediated construction of memory. The work distinguishes critical speculation from fabrication presented as documentary evidence.