Tel Aviv
Buildings a machine dreamt of the city, trained on its architecture, sharpened through every new image model and framed as Polaroids with addresses that never existed.
- Project
- Self-initiated
- Fragments of a Future Past
- Craft
- StyleGAN2 · Runway · Colab
- Stable Diffusion · Interface
Fragments of a future past
What does a city remember about itself, especially the parts it never built?
When AI was still in its early, unpredictable phase, I set out to explore Tel Aviv through its architectural ghostprints: buildings that never were, dreamt by a model trained on the city.
Each film shows the whole development in one go: the same building as the StyleGAN2 dream, its Stable Diffusion XL reading and, last, a pass through Krea's enhancer, the furthest stage the project reached.
I stopped there on purpose. At some point the buildings were realistic enough, and running them through every newer model would have made them sharper but more generic, losing the character that made them feel remembered.
The project wasn't about realism. It was about resonance.
Work in progress
I started in Runway, training a custom StyleGAN2 model on photographs of Tel Aviv's architecture. After 24 hours the results were uncanny: odd, unfamiliar structures that still carried the character of the city.
I moved the model into a Colab notebook by @dvsmethid and kept going: another 94 hours of machine dreaming. The AI learned not just to mimic the architecture, but to take buildings apart and build new ones. They lived somewhere between data and daydream. But they felt remembered.
With time, new tools emerged. I fed these ghost buildings into each new version of Stable Diffusion. Every model sharpened the image, and laid its own strange bias over it. I wasn't chasing accuracy. I was collecting echoes.
It was never Tel Aviv. And yet, somehow, it always was.
The archive
Finally, I built a simple interface that frames each image like a Polaroid: a moment snatched from the margins of imagination. Every picture gets a fake address; every frame holds a piece of architecture that never existed, but somehow still feels like home.
What emerged is a machine-made archive of a parallel Tel Aviv: a sunlit memory of a city that exists only in fragments of code and flashes of longing.
Interest Areas
