Visual Indeterminacy as the Right to Opacity: Reactivating Abadan’s Archive through Small-Data Generative AI
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Visual Indeterminacy as the Right to Opacity: Reactivating Abadan’s Archive through Small-Data Generative AI
This project investigates how generative AI can reactivate the archival record of Abadan, an oil city in southwestern Iran shaped by British colonial oil development, within a research-creation framework. Drawing on postcolonial theory, media arts, and memory studies, the project mobilizes a small-data approach to generative AI, using the Autolume system to generate moving images that resist literal representations of Abadan’s past through the visual indeterminacy of the generated imagery. By engaging the archive as a dynamic and unresolved field, the work foregrounds opacity as both an ethical and aesthetic strategy, responding to Édouard Glissant’s concept of “the right to opacity” of local communities in relation to historical experience. Through interdisciplinary and human–AI collaboration, the project sets the foundational aesthetic direction for the development of a spatial multimedia installation.
Hamed Rashtian, Arshia Sobhan, Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda, Philippe Pasquier