VISIBLE: Digital Resurrection

VISIBLE uses mobile AR and AI image generation to digitally resurrect a lost moving panorama from the nineteenth century. The panorama was originally created by Henry “Box” Brown, a famous Black abolitionist. Moving panoramas were fragile, flammable, and difficult to preserve. Like most panoramas, Brown’s is entirely gone. By converting archival descriptions of Brown’s work and related historical materials into language prompts for an AI image generator, VISIBLE examines how this potent new tool of collective memory envisions, remediates, and distorts an artifact that has no pictorial record.