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The making of
How I made these, and the idea behind them.
Where it started
I went through more than 1,500 archival photographs of Seattle, one by one, looking for the meaningful, the interesting, the cool ones, the frames that still had real life in them.
Then I made them come alive
The photograph
In color
The antique
Brought to life
Honestly, the first time I watched one of these move, it was jaw-dropping. A hundred-year-old moment, breathing again.
The idea
It is the start of Seattle’s history. And I had all of these antiques in hand, so I thought, let’s put them together: the real object, and the real moment it came from. One pulls you in, the other tells you why it matters.
The bigger picture
Anyone who has read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine knows the dream. To go back, to watch the past come back to life, to stand inside a moment that already happened. It is one of the oldest wishes we have. What I realized making these is that, with AI, we now have the start of a real one. Not the brass-and-velvet contraption, but a working proof of concept.
The process itself is not that difficult. What is amazing is how many true stories you can tell with it, and how much the value of truth is going to matter.
And the most accurate time machine we have is an actual photograph. A photo is real photons from the sun, the light that was truly there that day, captured and held. I think of each one as a seed of reality.
Plant that seed with care, stay honest about what is real and what is reconstructed, and you can stand inside a moment that genuinely happened. It might even make us re-evaluate our own.
Coming later this summer
I have always wanted to go back in time, and a few seconds of it was jaw-dropping. So I am making a film about the real history of Seattle, arriving later this summer.
It reaches past these photographs and objects into the historical record itself. You will see Seattle from the life before the settlers, through the city’s transformation, the great fire, the rebirth, and what it actually takes to become a world-class city.
Not a costume drama and not nostalgia. I went to the real archives, including the stuffy, unglamorous parts, because that is where the documented truth lives. If I can document what is true, that is the whole basis of it.
On the technology
I have been building with AI for over forty years. I am not new to it, and I am not afraid of it. What interests me is what it is actually good for.
The key value of this technology, the thing that matters, is truth. Used well, it lets me recover what was real: bring a faded photograph back to the color it once had, place a real object back in the room it lived in, and let a moment from a hundred years ago be seen again as it was. The goal was never to fake the past, but rather to get closer to it.
That is the standard I hold this work to. Where something is an AI reconstruction, I say so. Where something is a real archival photograph, I say that too. The technology earns its place only when it serves the truth of how people actually lived. (And if you are wondering why I leave the strange AI glitches and extra fingers in the video clips? Read why the imperfections are the point.)
In today’s life, and even more in the future, it is going to matter to know where content comes from. That is the value at the center of this work: Beauty, Truth, and Love, the core values of the Conru Art Foundation, and something we encourage everyone to share.