Collective memories
You may have come across Semioticapocalypse, a blog I started—frightening to consider how long ago it was, — that became essentially the origin of the «Collective Memories» (CM). Both Semioticapocalypse and the CM project emerged primarily from my longstanding love for black-and-white photography, which later evolved into an interest in its history and theory. Secondly, thу new enterprise owes much to the staggering and mesmerizing impact that the Cambrian explosion in the world of generative models has had (and continues to have) on me, particularly when it comes to diffusion models, generating images visual or textual inputs as well as from various combinations of thereof.
The term "collective memory" denotes the aggregate of memories, knowledge, and data that a social group holds, which is intrinsically linked to the group's identity. The term "collective memory" in English and its French counterpart "la mémoire collective" emerged in the latter half of the 19th century. Maurice Halbwachs, a philosopher and sociologist, further developed this concept in his 1925 work, «Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire» (eng. text). Both expansive and intimate social collectives can create, disseminate, and inherit collective memory.
Contrary to the term "collective memory," which is somewhat ambiguously defined yet generally accepted, the notion of "collective memories" is inherently problematic. Memories are the results of the individual acts of recollection, making the idea of "collective memories" paradoxical. Сontemporary diffusion models utilize vast amounts of often unidentified data, including historical and personal old photographs, vintage postcards, and other kinds of publicly circulating images. These models may be seen as involved in the prompts-driven singular acts of remembrance, producing images that paradoxically represent "collective memories," something otherwise unfeasible and ultimately, non-existent.