The paradox was apparent: the war was so close and so accessible through its poignant slogans, red flags, and solemn Victory Day speeches, but at the same time — so monodimensional and numb about the true human experiences that underlay it. Determined to do what many of his generation should also diligently explore, Yurenev starts researching what his silent hero had been keeping unsaid.
Photojournalism is modelled to bring us to places we cannot go to. AI’s promise is to bring us to events and places that never existed but could of, Yurenev
comments on one of his project’s starting points in a YouTube episode New Histories led by the artist and writer Gregory Eddi Jones. Keeping this thought in mind, he trains Generative Adversarial Neural Networks (GAN) on the extensive dataset of portraits of soldiers posing in studios or battlefields and teaches the system to produce new synthetic images — war photography without evidence that results from credible witnessing.
The dialogue between the referenceless collective archive and War Against War! manifesto published in 1924 by German anarcho-pacifist Ernst Friedrich becomes the material for Yurenev’s
Seeing against Seeing artist book, but the function of the newly conceived visual palimpsest is not limited to this statement only. And in the next chapter of The Silent Hero, his heroes did start speaking.