“The Probable Ancestor”: Dr. Theofanis Aritzis’s new digital exhibition, in which Artificial Intelligence is forbidden from inventing the past

In an era when genetic models can digitally bring the past to life in a matter of seconds, academic visual artist and researcher Dr. Theofanis (Fanis) Aritzis presents his new digital exhibition titled “The Probable Ancestor.” Following the international acclaim of his previous work, The Last Echo, which was presented in Germany and other European countries and explored the Epirus lament as a living archive of collective memory, the artist returns with a radical visual proposal: an 11-minute film composed exclusively of code, public archives, and silence, in which the machine is not allowed to invent anything.

The Story: 250 Years of Refugee History in 11 Minutes

Going back ten generations, each of us has 2,046 ancestors—most of whom left behind not even a name.

This single-channel digital film traces a family’s journey through five successive migrations and 250 years of history:

From a settlement in Bithynia that was abandoned in 1770 and the shores of the Black Sea,
to the 1923 Population Exchange and Northern Greece,
and from there, through the Civil War (1948–49), to the community of Greek political refugees in Krnov, Czechoslovakia, before returning to Thessaloniki in 1980.

In the play, no ancestor is named or depicted. The viewer sees only the places, the dates, the official documentation numbers, and the names of the regions in all the languages in which they were recorded (Greek, Turkish, Czech, English).

The Algorithm of Truth: Gold, Spots, and Empty Outlines

Every image in the film adheres to a strict rule of documentation:

Gold: Anything officially confirmed by documents and public records.
Dots: Anything based on oral family accounts.
Empty outline: Anything that remains unknown.

Artificial intelligence was used exclusively as a research tool for cross-referencing data and never as a witness. All images and synthetic music (tuned to 432 Hz) are generated from code and fixed data—no face, name, or voice has been created using generative models.

“We are entering an era in which a convincing ancestor can be fabricated more quickly than a real one can be found. I wanted to keep the empty spaces empty. A convincing fabrication is harder to erase than an honest void.”

— Dr. Theofanis (Fanis) Aritzis

EXHIBITION IDENTITY