Dezgo's Chinatown

2025

How Chinatown as a community exists verses how it is perceived by tourists are two different versions of reality. The later is not a real place, but a fantasy. Chinese culture is “packaged” through heightened imagery to draw outsiders in. I explore these ideas by using AI (Dezgo) to create images of what it thinks a Canadian Chinatown is. As AI is taught through the information we feed it, the results of these images are not just what AI thinks, but how the public views a whole community.

            Using salt prints contradict two opposite ends of the photography spectrum. Early photographic process verses the latest in technology, a handtied process verses modern techniques. Salt printing adds a historic element to an image, but if the image is fabricated not through reality, is there a historic element to begin with?