Revaleka

Synthetic Imaging, Abraham & Smith HQ, Bandung — May 2025

Before this work existed, something else had already taken shape in my mind, yes the Still-Life album, locked into my working map for 2026. It was initially conceived as a continuation of my oil painting practice, presenting still-life works that step outside the formal conventions that have long defined the genre. The objects I wanted to bring forward were things from an older everyday life, ones that once filled our days but have quietly disappeared from sight. Not simply sweet nostalgia, but something closer to a tribute paid to objects we left behind without ever saying goodbye.

The aesthetic reference I borrowed from instant cameras. There is something in the way people use instant cameras that strikes me as honest. No pretense of perfect composition, no photography rules to follow. Just the desire to capture a moment with people who matter. From there I imagined Still-Life as oil paintings scaled up to the dimensions of instant film formats, complete with their iconic borders.

What I did not anticipate was how far the preparation for this album would go. A generative AI workshop at Abraham & Smith HQ Bandung in January 2025, which eventually grew into the Synthetic Imaging exhibition in May 2025, expanded the scope of my creative process far beyond what I had originally mapped out. Synthesized Nostalgia was born from that space, as an exploration that enriched the Still-Life album from a direction I had not seen coming.

In this exhibition I was no longer painting. I was integrating AI into an existing approach, using Bing AI to generate ten pseudo-still-life images of objects that never truly existed, yet feel deeply familiar because they were shaped by an algorithm trained on the visual aesthetics of the past.

Each generated image was printed using a Fujifilm Instax printer across three formats, Wide, Square, and Mini. That choice was not decorative. Each format carries its own weight of association. Some recall family documentation, others feel like portraits given as gifts between friends, others carry the atmosphere of photographs once pinned to a teenager's bedroom wall. I then displayed them using wooden clips, jute rope and wire grid frames, the most common and familiar way people hang visual memories at home.

This is where the irony does its work. The entire installation speaks the visual language of intimacy, something immediately recognizable, and yet the memories hanging there never happened. Not to anyone. They are algorithmic fabrications disguised as a personal archive.

Nostalgia, for me, has always worked this way. It never truly reproduces the past. It reconstructs it through filters of affection and collective memory that have long been distorted by time. What Synthesized Nostalgia does is simply make that mechanism more literal, more visible. The question I want to leave with the audience is not whether AI can make art. It is something more unsettling. Whether the longing you feel standing in front of these images comes from your own memory, or from something constructed by an algorithm that has never experienced anything at all.

I do not position AI as a threat in this process. I treat it as a new brush in a wider studio, a conceptual tool that demands more precision in how I articulate intention, because every word in a prompt carries immediate visual consequence.