PI: Joel Silverman (Joel Silverman Studio)

During the Union Army’s occupation of Atlanta at the end of the Civil War in 1864, the photographer George N. Barnard photographed the city before Atlanta was burned. Barnard created a series of famous photographs using a mobile darkroom tent which he moved around the city on a horse-drawn carriage. I will replicating this tent as an AI-enabled camera obscura placed at the exact sites where the photographs were made. This tent experience will pop up throughout Atlanta at multiple sites of the original 1864 photographs.

Visitors will experience “time portals” through this modern camera obscura. When the visitor enters the tent, they will see the historic photographs projected where they were taken, bleeding into the present-day view. An AI image-to-image stable diffusion model will be trained to visually negotiate in real time between the archival images and the contemporary view.

For example, the tent will be placed at present-day 703 Marietta Street, the site of a photograph showing soldiers guarding cannons at Fort Hood, which eventually became the Georgia Tech campus. The AI blending of the scenes will show car traffic and a MARTA bus driving through the war-ravaged scene, and the familiar Coca-Cola headquarters rising from the horizon where it eventually will be sited. Both versions will show the railroad tracks which run unchanged in 2026 along the route visible in the 1864 photograph.