Artist Alexia Achilleos utilises artificial intelligence generative adversarial networks to rework images of the Wellcome Collection

The British photographer John Thomson's photographs of Cyprus in 1878 are a reflection of the political, ideological and cultural concerns of his time. His orientalist photographs of the island and its natives, posed and staged, decayed and in need of salvation by the British empire, helped shape the image of Cyprus that its colonists sought to communicate. Photographs from the Wellcome Collection’s archive in London, of John Thomson’s expedition to Cyprus in 1878, as the island was annexed to Britain, have been re-interpreted with the use of artificial intelligence imaging. Originally staged photographs of people, architecture and nature, the AI-generated images portray a ragged, wild, eerily familiar yet alien landscape. While the resulting images resemble the geology of the Mediterranean island, an uncanny quality remains