Two Winters

A collaboration with popsto, a Finnish time-lapse photographer who documents aurora borealis and outdoor landscapes in West Lapland.

popsto shot the sky. Real aurora timelapses — hours of exposure, the actual northern lights. I made the foreground figures using Deforum, a diffusion-based video synthesis tool. Synthetic figures in a real landscape.

The inversion is the concept. The sky is usually the realm of the ethereal, the imagined. Ground is reality — ground truth, firmly anchored. We flipped it. His sky is real. My foreground is AI. Reality and imagination trade places.

Winter always leads to spring.