Latent Pines / Peter Dubinski

Latent Pines is a generative video loop that considers the fragility of journalistic truth. Developed through a generative adversarial network (GAN), an algorithmic architecture that generates synthetic instances of data derived from inputted information, the work consists of hundreds of nocturnal photographs of pine trees that have been manipulated by machine learning to establish new connections between the varying organic forms. Seeking thresholds of documentary photography, the work asks if photographs allow us a view of previously dormant aspects of the world? Or do photographs only allow us understanding through connections made by a second hand? The light of the flash can only reach so far. Guided by an interest in the processes of mythmaking and the ways in which the internet accelerates and warps shards of information, Latent Pines embodies a sense of the familiar crossing into the strange.

Bio: Peter Dubinski (b.1999) makes photographs among the woods and rivers of Ontario and Quebec, seeking thresholds of the human role as a quiet observer and active participant in photographic storytelling. Subjects and interests that guide his practice include; animals, myth, the fragile line between fact & figment, and the human role in ecological disturbance. He considers his work sequentially within the pages of photographic books. 

(click image for video)