Historically Yours · field notes

Behind the synthetic portraits and voices

Before this project, what did you imagine these women looked and sounded like? Did you know them at all?

This is satire. The portraits, shortened names, personalities and synthetic voices in Historically Yours are contemporary interpretations. They are prompts for reflection, not reconstructions.

EU label indicating AI involvement

Artificial, on purpose

The host portraits, live dialogue and music are fully AI-generated outputs. The voices are synthetic. The concept, character direction, scripted passages, prompts, selection, interface and historical framing are by Lina Ruth Harder.

How the EU AI labels apply here
EU label: Fully AI-Generated

Used hereThe portraits were generated from prompts without reference images. Live replies and Suno music are generated by AI without live human review.

EU label indicating AI involvement

Used for synthetic audioThe intro, adverts and sign-offs are human-written. ElevenLabs generates the performances, so the voices are artificial even when the words are mine.

EU label: Partially AI-Modified

Not currently usedThe historical coin, portrait and photograph are displayed as source material. They have not been turned into AI face swaps or altered historical evidence.

The EU icons are optional transparency tools. Artistic, fictional and satirical works still disclose AI involvement, but may do so without interrupting the work. EU guidance and icon definitions ↗

Which historical cliché are you?

A “highly scientific” personality test. Your answers stay on this device.

Cleo · Cleopatra VII

1. Before today, Cleopatra was mainly…

2. Her voice sounded…

Toinette · Marie Antoinette

3. Your first image was…

4. Her imaginary voice was…

Henri · Henrietta Swan Leavitt

5. Before today, you knew her as…

6. You imagined her voice as…

Our host: Cleo

Cleopatra VII

69–30 BCE
The project's synthetic portrait of Cleo
My interpretation, made with AIOpenAI GPT Image 2.0, prompted by Lina Ruth Harder. No reference image supplied.
Bronze coin bearing a profile portrait of Cleopatra VII
A surviving traceBronze coin, Alexandria, 51–31 BCE. Photograph: Daderot, CC0. Image source ↗

A familiar type

Eyeliner, black hair, gold and dangerous glamour. Later European art and cinema did plenty of the casting.

Who shaped her memory?

Cleopatra ruled Ptolemaic Egypt from 51 to 30 BCE. Her coins were political images, not passport photos, and nobody recorded her voice.

Greek and Roman writers, including Plutarch, wrote after Rome defeated her. Later retellings kept the seduction and often misplaced the government, languages and diplomacy.

Her popular afterlife

Medieval writers made her devoted, Shakespeare made her gloriously complicated, and later art turned her into an exotic femme fatale. Hollywood added spectacle: Claudette Colbert in Cleopatra (1934), then Elizabeth Taylor in the lavish Cleopatra (1963). Each age found the Cleopatra it fancied.

Our host: Toinette

Marie Antoinette

1755–1793
The project's synthetic portrait of Toinette
My interpretation, made with AIOpenAI GPT Image 2.0, prompted by Lina Ruth Harder. No reference image supplied.
Chalk portrait of Marie Antoinette in a park by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun
A surviving traceMarie Antoinette in a Park, Vigée Le Brun, c. 1780–81. Public Domain. The Met ↗

A familiar type

Powder, pearls, impossible hair and royal indifference. The ship was my joke. The lavish cliché was already waiting.

Who shaped her memory?

Marie Antoinette became queen in 1774. Court portraits polished her image; revolutionary pamphlets and caricatures made her foreign, sexual and ruinously extravagant.

Her privilege was real. So were gendered inventions. She was innocent in the Diamond Necklace affair and probably never said “let them eat cake”. Nobody recorded her voice, though costume dramas remain undeterred.

Her popular afterlife

She has been recast as traitor, martyr, bad mother, fashion icon and doomed teenager. Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) wrapped Kirsten Dunst in pastel excess and pop music. The look escaped the film and marched into fashion, design and museum culture. Apparently the revolution could not kill the brand.

Our host: Henri

Henrietta Swan Leavitt

1868–1921
The project's synthetic portrait of Henri
My interpretation, made with AIOpenAI GPT Image 2.0, prompted by Lina Ruth Harder. No reference image supplied.
Historical photograph of Henrietta Swan Leavitt
A surviving traceHenrietta Swan Leavitt, unknown photographer, published 1922. Public Domain. Image source ↗

A familiar type

Serious, restrained and quietly brilliant: the familiar woman scientist waiting behind a more famous man.

Who shaped her memory?

At Harvard College Observatory, women “computers” measured stars from photographic plates. It was skilled work with restricted status and lower pay.

Leavitt found the relation that lets astronomers measure vast distances. Others used it to redraw the universe. Her plates and notes survive; her voice does not. Institutions are still correcting the credit.

Her popular afterlife

For decades, Leavitt barely had one. Her discovery travelled further than her name. Later books, exhibitions and Lauren Gunderson’s play Silent Sky brought her forward as the overlooked woman scientist. Useful repair, though “quiet genius denied credit” can become its own tidy script.

Why a podcast?
Historically Yours podcast cover showing Cleo, Toinette and Henri around microphones

A podcast sounds intimate, current and confidently informed. It gives three women from the past the cultural equipment of present-day authority: microphones, branding and opinions on demand. Synthetic speech makes that authority suspiciously easy to manufacture.

The cover deliberately borrows the cliché of women gathered to gossip. Put men around microphones and we are invited to see a serious discussion; put women there and suddenly it is chatter. Research offers no such tidy divide, but the stereotype persists. Historically Yours uses it, then lets the hosts discuss empire, revolution, science and your problems. They gossip too. So did plenty of historians, only with footnotes.

Gossip and gender stereotypes — Journal of Gender Studies ↗

A very brief history of the Dialogues of the Dead

In the second century, Lucian of Samosata wrote thirty short dialogues set in the Underworld. Dead rulers, heroes, philosophers and rich men discover that status travels badly. The powerless get the best lines.

The form kept returning. European writers translated and reinvented Lucian; Fontenelle’s New Dialogues of the Dead (1683) paired figures from different periods so they could test each other’s reputations, ideas and vanity. Later versions used the dead to criticise the living without being quite so impolite in person.

Historically Yours turns that literary trick into a podcast. Cleo, Toinette and Henri are fictional approximations, not recovered personalities. The visitor supplies the present-day problem; AI supplies a fluent and unreliable afterlife.

Read Lucian — Perseus Digital Library ↗
View Fontenelle’s 1683 book ↗
The form’s later European life — Sorbonne Nouvelle ↗

How the portraits were made

AI-generated portrait of Cleo AI-generated portrait of Toinette AI-generated portrait of Henri

These are my interpretations, made with OpenAI GPT Image 2.0. I asked for modern podcast hosts with microphones and supplied no historical images.

I added jokes, including Toinette’s ship hair. The model supplied the eyeliner, gold, powdered excess and modest woman scientist. Apparently centuries of visual culture make excellent autocomplete.

They are inventions, not reconstructions. Their confidence is part of the problem.

Sources have viewpoints too. Plutarch wrote more than a century after Cleopatra and participated in a Roman literary tradition. Court portraits managed royal reputations. Archives preserve some lives more fully than others. Read the sources beside one another, and ask what each one was made to do.