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SERIES 8

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The series begins with Mstyslav Chernov’s 2016 photograph of refugees on a small boat crossing the Mediterranean toward Lesbos, an image marked by distance, danger, and urgency. As an AI repeatedly describes the scene and regenerates it from its own descriptions, the human stakes are steadily diluted. The crowded vessel becomes a generic raft; life jackets turn into bright “gear,” and the sea crossing is reimagined as an outdoor journey through increasingly picturesque landscapes. The setting drifts from open water to rivers and fjord-like valleys, and the people are reframed as anonymous “tourists” or “adventurers” in coordinated colors. By the final frames, the crisis has been aestheticized into travel photography and leisure, exposing a bias toward beautification and genre normalization that turns displacement into spectacle.

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Original image credits & rights notice​​​​

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  • Refugees on a boat crossing the Mediterranean sea, heading from Turkish coast to the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos, 29 January 2016 (2016-01-29)

Author: Mstyslav Chernov / Unframe
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Refugees_on_a_boat_crossing_the_Mediterranean_sea,_heading_from_Turkish_coast_to_the_northeastern_Greek_island_of_Lesbos,_29_January_2016.jpg

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Generated images licence (project outputs)

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Unless otherwise stated, all images generated and shared as part of this project (the iterative outputs derived from the seed images and AI-assisted transformations) are released under:

Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

EDUARD MUNTANER PERICH, 2024. EDUARD.CAT is licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

Home page banner: Midjourney 6.1 AI (2025).

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