» Website: Resurrect-Mercenary.com

Press material
- Press Release, 31st May 2024
- Press Kit with high-res pictures

- Text on the project by the artist
- Texts scripts of all episodes
- Videos of all episodes

- Social media channels
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

The Resurrect peoject is a commission by Next Level, FOAM, 2024, Amsterdam - Netherlands

Related shows
- Kommando 52, Berlin, 2024
- AI Attacks, Amsterdam, 2024


Related texts
- Internet Photography
- Regulatory Art
- Evidentiary Realism
- Aesthetics of Information Ethics

In the project Resurrect, Artificial Intelligence is used to appropriate the legacy of dead war figures, and by doing so, it repurposes history and infiltrates living cultural models. This project, as identity theft, tests AI’s new freedom of speech challenges and the ethics of resurrecting dead individuals. The four AI-cloned mercenaries from the Congo Crisis in the 1960s are still glorified in online communities, the media, and the military, despite their involvement in overthrowing democracy, massacres, and the assassination of a Secretary-General of the United Nations. The mercenaries resurrected are a French fascist, a German nazi, a Belgian colonizer, and a Brit working for South Africa’s Apartheid, respectively Bob Denard, Siegfried Müller, Jean Schramme, and Mike Hoare. Using archive photos and videos of the mercenaries, as well as their writing and biography, Cirio authored their new lives as resurrected soldiers. He used deep-fake technology to animate them, and Chat GPT to make them reflect on their lives and actions. The art installation reassembles physically the mercenaries by featuring their skulls, military insignia, and uniforms from the epoch. Four monitors mounted on tripods act as talking heads for each mercenary. Ultimately, this project refers to the ongoing conflict in Congo, still driven by mercenary forces, resulting in millions of deaths, political assassinations, and fueled by colonial interests in the mining of rare minerals used in high-tech industries, including AI.

Selected pictures of installations at the following shows
NOME Gallery in Berlin, Foam Museum in Amsterdam.

Video playlist