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About that one acacia tree in Africa
Moving away beyond its aesthtic qualities, I wanted to explores stylegan's potential as a narrative design tool. Using stylegan to revisit the acacia tree book cover trope - applied too often to novels with African themes regardless of actual content - to unpack it as an imagined geography
Imagined geographies are the ways in which a space is rendered though images and literature by others. They are reflections of the preconceptions, desires and anxieties of their creators than the actual place. The also operate as resistive tools to maintain a narrative of a place. The 19th century travel writing and photographs created a colonial imagined geography of the continent as under and barbaric to justify the colonizing mission. The acacia tree trope is a post-colonization and post- modern continuation of that painting a nostalgic fantasy of 'natural empty frontier spaces' in Africa devoid of people, to flat the complexity of the continent, quell anxieties of a a disappearing African and negate it increasing modernity. They underscore parallels between fiction and map-making, how reality of a place can be shaped its perceptions often mapped in literature first. With immersive technologies we can make explicit these connection, and interograte the narrative.
