A Dance That Never Happened

The work

Waiting for Mom with Bobe and Danielito comes from a photograph in my family album. The girl in the red dress is me as a child; behind me are my grandmother and my baby cousin, whom I loved playing with.

Years later, I used this painting for one of my first experiments with Luma Dream Machine. I uploaded the image, wrote a prompt and waited to see what the AI would do.

The result surprised me more than I expected. Seeing my grandmother move again, even in this artificial way, was strangely emotional. For a few seconds, something that had always existed as a still photograph, and later as a painting, seemed to come alive.

But the Dream Machine did more than add movement. It invented gestures, expressions and actions that had never been part of the original image. The figures began to dance and in one version an extra hand appeared where no hand should be.

I found these mistakes as interesting as the more convincing moments. The system was filling in what it could not possibly know. It made me wonder how much of what I was watching still belonged to my own past, and at what point it had become a new fiction.

This brought me to the work of Chino Otsuka, a Japanese-born photographer, writer and educator who moved to the UK as a teenager. Her work often draws on personal archives and explores questions of home, identity, memory and belonging.

In her series Imagine Finding Me, Otsuka digitally places her adult self into photographs from her childhood, creating encounters between past and present that never actually happened. Writing about the work, she describes becoming “a tourist of my own history.”

I recognize something in that idea. When I watched my grandmother move again, I too was looking at my own history from a strange new position. But there is an important difference. Otsuka deliberately constructs her encounters with the past, while I gave my painting to the AI and allowed it to invent what might happen next. I recognized the memory, but I could not control the new story the image was beginning to tell.

What interests me is not simply seeing one of my paintings move. It is that uncertain space between memory and invention. A family photograph already holds a moment that is gone; the painting transforms it once, and the AI transforms it again.

The dance never happened. My grandmother never made those gestures, and the figures never moved in that way. Yet watching them, I still felt something real. Perhaps every time we return to the past, we change it a little. Memory may be less like an archive and more like a story we continue to reimagine.

Explore Chino Otsuka’s Imagine Finding Me →

In Chino Otsuka’s own words:

“A new journey has begun,
on board a time machine built from digital tools.
I’m travelling back
transported to places where I once belonged,
cities where I once visited
and on arrival I find myself from the past.
Navigating through the labyrinth of memory
become a tourist of my own history.
And throughout this unique journey I keep a diary.”

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The studio experience

Two hours in the studio, just you or you and one other person. Pick a technique and take home what you make. Materials and fika included.

It works as a birthday or anniversary gift, a creative date instead of a restaurant, an afternoon for two friends, or a parent and child from age ten up. Same price whether you come alone or bring someone. 1 000 kr per session (1 or 2 people) · Roslagsgatan 21, Stockholm

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