Multidisciplinary artist Cari Gonzalez-Casanova collects descriptions of dream travel destinations from the people she meets and interviews. Through recorded conversations, she captures their words, visions, dreams and imaginary sensations of these places. Using AI tools, she then uses their words to generate artificial images of these real places, which CGC then transforms into postcards. On the back of these postcards, a sentence appears that the AI was unable to translate into an image.

Interested in the phenomena surrounding language; its limitations in conveying complex states of perception, the subjectivity of translation and the central role language occupies in AI image generation, CGC subjected fantasized descriptions of cities to the AI image generator in French and then in English. This exercise revealed interesting cultural biases in the algorithmic language, such as the AI's tendency to generate an image of a European-style city when the prompt is in French, in contrast to the image generated with an English prompt, which is quite close to the city described (but not named). The complexity and subjectivity of the stories also tested AI's inability to translate the sensory and poetic expressions of our fantasized narratives, resulting in images that omitted certain details.

Her Invisible Cities project takes its title from Italo Calvino's iconic 1972 book, which explores the limitless possibilities of the imagination through descriptions of the cities visited by Marco Polo. Through the objects, drawings and videos produced during her residency, she explores the subject of tourism and the way we construct a mythology of place, the emotions of objects and the nostalgia or even melancholy that sometimes forms around objects or images of things and places for which we have constructed a complex emotional character. “I'm also interested in the phenomena that occur in tourist locations; how a place can sometimes adapt to tourists' fantasies, creating fabricated experiences that blur the boundaries between an “authentic experience”, in which our personal sensitivities and memories participate in our perception of a situation, and an experience that can be described as fabricated, in which we find it hard to ignore the influence of a mediatized account of that same situation.”