For her immersive artwork Burn From Absence, artist Emeline Courcier creates an archive where there was none. Using artificial intelligence, she recreates a family album, visualizing and verifying a history that has been hidden, documenting it from her perspective. In the four-channel installation, digitally created images illustrate an audio track layering her family members’ memories of life in Laos, the ‘Vietnam’ war, and new beginnings in France. She produced it during an immersive residency at the Phi Centre in Montreal, which is also serving as the work’s distributor.
While AI usually mines and perpetuates the dominant narrative, Courcier completely upends that, building an archive that is a reckoning and a reclaiming and, despite its AI-creation, very real. After its premiere at IDFA last November, where it won the DocLab Special Mention for Digital Storytelling, Documentary spoke to Courcier about truth, archives, and working with deeply personal material.
Did you always intend to use AI to recreate these memories?
I think using AI is really the core of the project, but how I treated it really evolved during the process.
In 2023, I had heard about AI, but never used it before. I was opposed to it at first, as a lot of artists were—but I was kind of curious at the same time, because what I like is the fact that you can cheat on reality.
originally published on Documentary