LINDA DOUNIA REBEIZ


Linda Dounia Rebeiz is an artist and designer who investigates the philosophical and environmental implications of technocapitalism. She is inspired by science fiction, speculative design, solarpunk, and degrowth. 

Her work mediates her memories as alternative truths and evidence of excluded ways of being and doing. It is formed through the dialogue (and tensions) between analogue and digital mediums. 

In 2023, Linda was recognized on the TIMEAI100 list of most influential people in AI for her work on speculative archiving – building AI models that help us remember what we have lost. 



FERAL BLUEPRINT

Speculative Archiving
(2023)


Feral Blueprint models changes to the urban landscape of my hometown, Mbour. This project explores the cost of rapid urbanization and the fragile landscapes it creates. This series is a tangent from my process working on a commissioned project by the Institut Francais du Senegal for the Biennal Sur. 

I gathered cartography references of the town over the years (the earliest available mappings are from the colonial era). This was purely to use as references in the work for the biennial which interprets the changes in fictional maps of the town. At some point, I had enough cartography references and fictional maps that I decided to train a GAN with it.

I then took some outputs from that GAN and animated them. I used some scripts to further abstract the animations – I was wondering if it would be interesting to view the changes at a pixel level. That paid off because the outputs felt even more topographic, but there was also something organic about them. It was as if I could zoom in and see microscopic changes to the town as they occurred. So I decided to curate stills from those animations that best channelled this feeling into this body of work.

Feral Blueprint 

Feral Blueprint (inverted)



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2024, DAKAR, SENEGAL