Paraphrasing DeLillo’s passage in White Noise, my research investigates AI-generated pseudo-photographs through a series of prints on Polaroid film depicting Italy’s most visited tourist attraction. According to data from the Ministry of Culture, the Colosseum Archaeological Park recorded a total of 14,733,395 visitors in the latest survey in 2024. To generate new images, AI relies on endless databases which, through machine learning, allow it to recognise visual elements and respond to specific user prompts. To reproduce a photorealistic Colosseum, it therefore needs multiple photographs of the monument. But what happens when a pseudo-photograph produced by AI is printed on a Polaroid, which in the common sense still seems to maintain a direct relationship with reality? Is what we see still the real Colosseum, or is it another monument that does not belong to our history? What impact will the millions of photographs in the databases, taken partly as a result of overtourism, have on the new visual aesthetics generated by AI?
A potentially infinite series of Polaroids is an attempt at an answer.

(2025)