By Will Lakeman

This exhibition was inspired by Fort Regent and was a recreation/representation of his memories and dreams from his childhood spent there.

Not only did he shoot the current state of the Fort, he also used AI software to create images that replicated his memories of the place. These images can be seen as quite strange however this is due to them being inspired by memories and dreams rather than the exact thing showing how our mind plays tricks on us. His work was accompanied by a custom soundscape and included elements of smell and touch allowing visitors to revisit their own dreams.

Here are some of his writing about the exhibition:

This panel gives an insight into what inspired him and the reasons he decided to produce this exhibition which helped everyone to understand the meaning behind his images.

“Everyone has the potential to make art that is meaningful to them. Anyone can be a good photographer, you do not need expensive gear, you just need to care. AI is the next thing that will become democratic. I would love to see other people’s weird dreams.”

Overall, I thought the exhibition was fascinating and thought the use of physical props and the senses added to the atmosphere. This created as close an environment to the fort itself as possible within the gallery allowing the visitors to feel more involved and connected to the exhibition and gave any visitors who had not been to the fort during its ‘hayday’ an idea of the experience.

Will spoke very openly about his Autism and explained how this created his fascination of the fort and it became an obsession. It was because of this fixation that he decided to make it into a project and used his memories to replicate his own experiences there. This lead to him talking about how memories aren’t always accurate and can play tricks on us. For example, he spoke about the foot bath by the pool and his images show a purple slime like liquid as this is how he remembers it however after researching and looking into these details he found out the water was in fact brown and not a vibrant purple showing how his mind had changed the way he perceived this.

Not only is this image inspired by a false memory, he also created it using AI (artificial intelligence). Using AI allowed him to create this strange image and he just kept playing with it until he thought it correctly represented his memory. The final results of the images try to evoke the odd, fantastical memories created during childhood.