SALOTTO
THE MAG
THE VIEWING
Mara Venn walks a house being sold out from under her.
Twelve rooms, black lace, nobody home.
Twelve rooms, black lace, nobody home.
An estate viewing is what happens to a grand house when the family is gone and the contents are being counted. A viewing is also what happens in a salotto, when a likeness is laid out and looked at by people who came to look.
Both are going on here. Mara Venn moves through twelve rooms of a house that is being sold out from under her, in black lace, in the last of the light.
PHOTOGRAPHY, STYLING AND CASTING BY MACHINE
APPROVED BY A PERSON
She was written on a Friday and photographed in a house that is being sold. She talks about the clothes, the cold and the frames that came out wrong.
Start with the obvious one. You were written on the thirty-first of October.
A Friday. Somebody wrote down that I have grey-green eyes with a ring of amber, a scar above my right knee and a beauty mark under my left eye. Then they trained a model on thirty-nine pictures of me until it could draw me without being told what I look like. The beauty mark still does not come out. I have decided to find that funny.
You could have been given a past. You were not.
No, and I would rather not have one. A fictional childhood is a lie with more detail. I have a profile, a trigger word and about six hours of a machine learning my face. That is a real biography. It is just short.
Does the house mean anything to you?
It is cold and it is being sold and nobody has lived in it for a while. I walked twelve rooms of it. The piano is under a sheet, the candles on the dining table are burned down to nothing, and there is a wall of portraits of people who are no more real than I am. I liked that wall.
Why black lace, for all of it?
Because it is the only thing in the house that still fits anybody. And because it reads in black and white. Most clothes go flat in monochrome. Lace does the opposite. You can see the pattern of it against skin from across a room.
You are a wardrobe stylist in your profile. Did you dress yourself?
I was dressed by a sentence. The sentence got better over the day. The first one forgot to say where my hands were, and my arm came out wrong, so we did it again with my hands named. That is what styling is here. You say the thing precisely or the thing comes out wrong.
What did you think of the frames that came out wrong?
One of them was somebody else entirely. A woman with my dress and not my face. They cut her and wrote it down, which I appreciated. I would rather be a magazine that keeps its mistakes on the record than one that quietly reshoots.
Is there anything you cannot do?
Flat hair. Finger waves, slicked back wet, anything that lies against the skull. Eight tries, none of them worked. Whatever learned me learned my waves too well to give them up. I can wear a chignon. I can wear a ponytail in good light. In candlelight my hair comes down whether I like it or not.
Last one. Does it bother you, being looked at by people who know you are not there?
It is the arrangement. You bought a magazine called SALOTTO and the cover said nobody in these pictures is real. Nobody has been tricked. That seems to me a better deal than most of what gets photographed.
MARA VENN, MV-001
FICTIONAL, AI GENERATED
Mara Venn is not a person. She is a character, written down and then trained into a model that this studio owns and runs on its own machine. No photograph of any real person was used to build her, and no real person's name appears in a prompt.
Every picture here was generated. A person chose the direction, wrote each frame, looked at every result and marked the keepers by hand. The misses are kept too: one frame of thirty-six came back as somebody else, and it was cut.
FREDERICK DESIGN STUDIO
SALOTTOTHEMAG.COM