In the winter of 1954, the northeast of the United States — specifically New Jersey — experienced extreme weather conditions in which, on 27 occasions, temperatures dropped dramatically in a matter of minutes. Forty or more degrees instantly. In 14 cases, these bizarre weather events resulted in instant death. Even more strange was that all of them were middle-aged male commuters. The dead remained frozen in place, at first a thing of horror for locals, yet soon enough children would be merrily building snowmen around their bodies. Or did they?
It’s less than ten years since Donald Trump and associated cohorts began their war upon truth, but in that short time it feels as though everything has changed. On the cusp of an even more dramatic transition in global society, US-based British conceptual artist Phillip Toledano has published a new art book that explores an invented history of New York City from 1940 to 1950; his AI-generated images of ‘Another America’ accompanied by short stories from New Yorker writer John Kenney.
At once familiar and perplexing, Toledano’s images represent the confusing duality that we live today. Conspiracies and confusion, real corruption and imagined dishonesty, the world has lost a grounding of reality. With the dawn of artificial intelligence, every last fibre of what we could conceive as tangible reality is about to be lost. At the push of a button, photographic evidence of histories that never existed can be created, at rapidly expanding rates of believability. Disasters, happenings, deaths, occurrences, moments in time all blown apart and ready to be reassembled however the narratives of those in control choose to play out.
From a midtown plane crash to a bison stampede, technicolour bubbles to burning hairdos, Phillip Toledano’s Another America is a melancholic imagination of a time that seems like it could have happened, yet surely can’t have. Just true enough to plant a seed of doubt, whimsical enough to write off as fantasy. And that’s exactly the sort of ‘reality’ that we can look forward to.
Published by L’Artiere, Another America is an 80-page hardback with the first edition limited to 750 copies, and is available now for 65€.
