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Fantastic Planet: Composite, June 1970 Asks a Model to Remember San Francisco's First Pride

Almost nobody photographed San Francisco's first Pride in 1970. Fantastic Planet asked an AI model to remember it, and the 32 Tezos 1/1s of Composite, June 1970 show what a thin record leaves out.

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In June 1970, queer San Francisco marched up Polk Street. The next afternoon about 200 people gathered at Speedway Meadow in Golden Gate Park for a Gay-In, now remembered as the city's first Pride. Almost nobody photographed it. Composite, June 1970, a set of 32 AI generated 1/1s by Fantastic Planet on Tezos, starts from that gap. "I asked the machine to remember something it was never taught."

Fantastic Planet, a queer artist based in Los Angeles whose work deals with queer theory, algorithmic bias and visibility, began the project in 2024 with Analog Diffusion, a Stable Diffusion model trained on analog photographs. What came back was a narrow picture: white men in leather and sunglasses, faces that melt at the jaw, hands that come up short, skin held in one small range of tones. Black, brown, transgender and gender nonconforming people are close to absent. In 2026 he rebuilt the same settings in ComfyUI and generated about 2,000 more images. "It held."

The series treats that failure as its subject. Many people at those early marches stayed out of photographs on purpose, and 10 years later AIDS arrived. "A thin record trains a thin model." Fantastic Planet edited the set the way a photographer covering those 2 days might have, and the titles name what the machine gets wrong: Wonderful Trim, No Shirt; Good Trousers, Half a Face; The Crowd Came Out as Glitter; All Clothes, Nobody Home; More Drag Than Bodies; Twelve Hundred Legs.

The 32 works were minted in the artist's own contract on October 8 and released on objkt on November 9, 2026. A printed zine goes with them: 100 hand numbered copies, 24 pages on 100lb matte stock, with images that are not part of the digital set.

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