Engine Errors / Self-Portrait Projection Excerpt

‘engine errors / self-portrait’ 2017

medium: digital prints, video projection

dimensions: 16’ x 12’.

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In this piece, a neural network is trained on a facial images of Chinese engineering students to teach the computer how to dream up artificially-constructed portraits. This piece treats the network’s inherent flaws as a medium in itself: by reappropriating the generative blurriness in the facial reconstructions it seeks to illustrate how novel AI technologies can be used as a self-fulfilling form of erasure. In this case, the ghostly images that result reflect society’s tendency to dehumanize people of Asian descent often in terms that focus on them as an aggregate or as autonomous laborers devoid of individual identity. Here I impose myself onto these representations by projecting video of my own facial features on top of these images to create a computer-mediated subhuman composited from both the living body and the digitally-imagined.