The work in this exciting exhibition recreates the strange hold that childhood spaces have on our adult memories, all centred around the Jersey childhood mecca of old Fort Regent. Lakeman is a photographer who has nurtured an obsessive interest in ‘the Fort’, and has spent his adult life revisiting weird dreams of this iconic building and its heyday in the early 1990s.

This exhibition includes a lot of bright colours, I think when you’re young everything seems more colourful, which the AI that created these images portrayed very well. I think that when people think of their childhoods, it seems a lot more drastically fun than it would have been in reality. Lakeman was describing one of the images in the exhibition, which includes a snake slide, he said that from his memory, the snake slide was, in appearance, a lot more fun than it actually was. I think a lot of people do this subconsciously, they want things to be more fun than they possibly could have been. In a place like Jersey, where there isn’t much to do for young people, a lot of people who grew up while the fort was a leisure centre may make it more colourful or fun in their imaginations than it was. 

Will Lakeman used his childhood memories of the Fort to create the exhibition. The way the exhibition was structured was very interesting, it was separated into different sections to show the different sections of the leisure centre that were there, each one having a scent diffuser and audio track to make the area seem real, for example the funfair had a diffuser to give a faint smell of popcorn and low noises from the funfair and the “pool” area had a faint smell of chlorine and low water noises. This makes a lot of people who grew up when it was that way feel that they’re there again.  

A lot of AI image generators create very colourful images, in dreams all your senses are heighten, especially your sight, everything seems brighter in light and colour.  Lakeman described one of his experiences at the pool where he hadn’t eaten, and all the colours became more colourful, the yellow tones from the sun increasing and seeing squares all around the area, he created the experience into an image with AI.