Human Error
Human Error is an ongoing project that responds to a fragmented family archive from Ukraine. Semerei’s fadether’s side of the family were deported by Soviet authorities from Shatsk (then recently annexed by the USSR) to Sita in the Khabarovsk region, nearly 10,000 kilometres away. After nine years in Siberia they were allowed to return, but not to their original home, which had been seized. From this entire history, less than twenty family photographs survive.
Working with this limited, fragile archive, Human Error uses artificial intelligence as a collaborator to explore how memory is constructed when evidence is scarce. Semerei trains custom Stable Diffusion models on the remaining family photographs and on found images of Ukrainians from the same period, sourced online and at flea markets. The generated images sit between familiarity and fiction: faces that never existed, yet feel uncannily plausible. These outputs become what the artist calls “pure memories”—visualisations of events that might have happened, or could have been remembered, had more images survived.
The title Human Error refers both to the randomness of survival within systems of repression and to the instability of memory itself. The project examines how far invented or AI-mediated images can still act as containers of emotional truth when historical truth is incomplete or damaged.
The project continued when Semerei found additional photographs through the only surviving distant relatives in Ukraine. Visiting Shatsk without knowing this part of the archive existed, she began her research there with the surrounding landscape, later translating it into lithography prints back in London to introduce a sense of physicality and tactile contact with the place, people, and memories.
