Rebuilt From Memories

Nine years of war in Syria has destroyed places of culture, economy and faith and left a whole society devastated. Considered lost, they are still alive in people’s memories. The idea: a virtual restoration of people’s pre-war memories using Instagram photos. Jung von Matt rebuilt three damaged environments in Aleppo as VR views, created as a collective memory via photogrammetry and machine learning. It involved mining thousands of Instagram posts via geotag variations in English, Arabic, and French. A pipeline rescaled and re-sorted the dataset via deep learning and used it for photogrammetry.