FAKE
DEEP
CONTENTS DEEP FAKE, Curator’s Statement_____________3 Isabel Beavers ERIC ANDERSON_____________________________5 JANNA AVNER_______________________________9 BHOWMIK + HAUTAMÄKI____________________11 TYLER BOHM_______________________________15 HENRY BROWN_____________________________17 CHRIS COMBS______________________________19 CURRY + GRADECKI_________________________21 LILIANA FARBER____________________________25 IAN HEISTERS______________________________29 RETTMER + BEAVERS_______________________31 DASUL KIM_________________________________35 HEATHER LOWE____________________________39 ANNETTE MARKHAM________________________41 MORESCHI + PEREIRA______________________43 JOTEVA, NG, NZI, KONEVSKIKH______________49 JEROEN VAN LOON_________________________51 EXHIBITION ORGANIZERS___________________53 Catalogue Designed by Isabel Beavers Cover Image by Henry Brown
DEEP FAKE When I was approached by Julia Butaine Hoel to guest curate an exhibition for Sci Art Initiative I had recently learned about neural lacing. The possibility of an artificial material being placed inside the human brain for the purpose of digital connectivity felt absurd but also like an immense leap forward. How did we get here? I became intensely interested in the subtle and invisible ways artificially intelligent materials and bodies had already infiltrated the limits of our minds and barriers of our bodily organs.
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The submissions that came through the open call were exciting and ranged in artistic mediums and geographies including Denmark, Brazil, The Netherlands, South Korea, Australia and the United States. It felt prescient to recognize that the threats, possibilities, and realities we face in relationship to AI and machine learning are common worldwide
despite the many different sociopolitical contexts we inhabit. The works selected for DEEP FAKE present many distinct observations, critiques and queries about AI. A number of works made connections between United States politics, the Trump administration specifically, and the free-wheeling dissemination of mis-information. Janna Avner presents a painting ‘TFW Sick of Fake News’ that depicts a domineering, clownish white house, the threat of viral misinformation looming darkly in the sky. This work, this year, felt particularly relevant. Jeroen van Loon comments on the proceedings between the tech giant Facebook and the US Congress. He runs the recorded trials through snapchat filters that add sunglasses, cowboy hats, money GIFs, and hearts overtop the main characters. Chris Combs’ work ‘Naked Mueller‘ occupies a 3-ring binder, with text-based content generated from an AI trained
on the Mueller Report. These works ask:Hautamäki created two complimentary how do machine learning technologies works ‘Panic Breeder’ and ‘Machina exponentially speed up the spread Baltica.’ Both take inspiration from the of viral mis-information? How is our ecological degradation of the Baltic Sea. democracy threatened when bad ‘Panic Breeder’ utilizes an AI trained actors intersect with sophisticated AI? on bird species from the Baltic Sea, generating new breeds of avian species Some artists lean towards the imaginary that could emerge from the present. Can capacities of AI. How can AI algorithms we place our fears and anxieties around generate new information, images, the climate crisis in future imaginaries? and symbols? How does this newness In contrast, ‘Machina Baltica’ is settled inscribe new potential histories, or in the present. Incorporating found rewrite old ones? Artist Tyler Bohm’s objects and materials from the Baltic sculptural ‘Generative UN’ includes ai- Sea it operates as an artifact, a fossil, a generated flags of imaginary nations. specimen frozen in time. Its semblance of Destabilizing the notion of national a skull reminds us of our own immortality, symbols, the work also suggests an and how we are linked to the fate of many alternative world in which our current species. nations, borders, and conflicts do not apply. Liliana Farber’s prints ‘Terram in ‘Current’ is an epic and layered Aspectu’ depict AI-generated islands. volumetric cinema work. The Farber trained an AI on historic maps investigations in AI optimization, of fake islands once believed to exist, volumetric cinema, personalized narrative but that have since been proven not and infinite livestream come together in to. Henry Brown creates landscape fluid and dextrous imagery. Created by Eli images generated from procedural Joteva, Provides Ng, Artem Koneskivkh, environments in video game worlds. and Ya Nzi, the work questions the future The uncanny sites feel familiar. They of volumetric cinema as much as it resemble the work of the Hudson River does our agency in relation to emerging School in scale and composition; yet, artificially intelligent technologies. Are we upon close inspection the digitalin control of our own livestreams? What ness of the spaces become apparent. happens to resources, environments Glitches in the environment emerge as and spaces under the constant gaze one’s sense of truth is dismantled. of surveillance? Is a new economy of exchange possible in this current of The works that I was particularly struck digital surveillance, reproduction, and by achieved a complexity of concept streaming? Have we already been swept and process that present conflicting away? and opposing ideas at once. The artists Dr. Samir Bhowmik and Jukka 4
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Eric Anderson Eric Anderson is an artist and writer living in Rochester, MN. His interactive installations have been commissioned by or featured in collaboration with the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity at the University of Paris, France, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the National Institutes of Health’s National Human Genome Research Institute, Mayo Clinic, the Open Source Pharma Foundation, Destination Medical Center and the Rochester Art Center. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his writing has appeared in Granta, American Letters & Commentary, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere.
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Feeding on Infinity, 2020, multimedia video,
“I am interested in exploring how existing technologies and infrastructures can take us beyond our common habits of thought and perception, challenge the obvious and apparent, or simply create new connections. My work has leveraged open source machine learning platforms, private healthcare databases and public WiFi networks. In the last few years, I have created datadriven outdoor lighting sculptures,
interactive sound and video installations, communitydriven public art initiatives and web-based media. Going forward, I want to consider how technologies designed to achieve optimization and efficacy can be repurposed to ask, what inefficiencies make us better human beings to one another. “ --Eric Anderson 6
Installation view of DEEP FAKE, January 2020, SUPERCOLLIDER Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
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Janna Avner
Janna Avner creates oil paintings and video works that respond to new technologies and current events. Janna’s paintings depict digital art by working with refraction gradients and reflective mediums that imitate the glow of computer screens. Her future series will address the complexities of identity and origin through internet culture and virtual spaces.
Janna cofounded FEMMEBIT, a digital art festival celebrating female-identifying artists based in Los Angeles. Janna’s artworks and curations have been covered by Vice/Creators Project, Hyperallergic, LA Weekly, Artforum, and ArtNews. Janna has also been a guest speaker for UCLA’s Digital Media Arts Department (2017), and the New York Times School (2019). Her . writings on Artificial Intelligence were selected for “What Future: The Year’s Best Ideas to Reclaim, Reanimate, and Reinvent Our Future,” a 2017 best-of-anthology considered by Smithsonian Magazine as one of the best science books of the year. Janna graduated from Yale University in 2012 and is a Master of Arts candidate at California State University Northridge.
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"The oil painting TFW Sick of Fake News depicts a White House in a Faulknerian state of decay, a Southern gothic overrun by bougainvillea—controlled by giant internet trolls peddling false and misleading claims and feeding on misinformation that destabilizes democracies. Democracy dies in the darkness, and fake news is that very darkness. This painting is not a hypothetical outcome, but rather a dream, a Hollywood backdrop held up by wooden posts subtly depicted in the piece. By definition a painting is an illusion, a tromp l’oeil, (Trump-lie), a deepfake.
TFW Sick of Fake News, 2020, Oil on Panel
Eradicating fake news is like playing whack-a-mole, when one site is taken down, another one pops up again. Technologists at The Verge explains that fake news’s dissemination and perniciousness is similar to that of a virus. What happens when voters are misinformed by slanted reportage—when information that’s useful is confused and twisted against itself, when information is politicized? Catastrophizing aside, are there not repercussions? TFW Sick of Fake News, depicts an alarming hypothetical outcome.” --Janna Avner 10
Samir Bhowmik + Jukka Hautamäki “Panic Breeder presents a quasi-nature documentary of imaginary fantastical species as the future inhabitants of the Baltic Sea. Taking inspiration from the evolution of species theorized by Charles Darwin, it comments on the iterative and adversarial capabilities of Artificial Intelligence to probe the terrifying future of the “survival of the fakest”. The artwork uses GAN (Generative Adversarial Network), a class of machine learning systems, where two neural networks (Generative & Discriminative) compete with each other for several training sessions. The trainings utilize a large dataset of extinct and endangered birds of the Baltic Sea to generate new images.
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Breeder
Panic
Still from Panic Breeder, Ai-generated Video
The animation created from these fake images presents an illusory transformation and evolution of the species. Furthermore, by quantifying the energy consumption of machine learning, from among the machine-generated breeding a singular creature is manifested in physical form. In this fictional scenario, the loss of species is counter-balanced by the possibilities of AI-generated creatures to act as a temporary, if not futile antidote to climate change panic and anxiety� --Samir Bhowmik +Jukka Hautamäki
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J u k k a Hautamäki Dr. Samir Bhowmik Samir Bhowmik (born 1975) is a Helsinkibased multidisciplinary Finnish artist. He received a PhD (Art & Design) from Aalto University, Finland, and a Master of Architecture from the University of Maryland, United States. Samir’s artistic research project “Imaginary Natures: Extractive Media & the Cultural Memory of Environmental Change” (Kone Foundation) examines media cultures of extraction through artistic and critical AI practices. Samir teaches New Media, Infrastructures and Environment at the Aalto School of Arts, Design & Architecture.
Jukka Hautamäki is a Finnish media artist (MFA), based in Helsinki, Finland. He works with AI, lens-based media, sound and electronics. The works are presented in the form of an installation and generative media art works. The installations reflect on the construction and repetition of AI and digitally generated images. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Gallery MUU (2020), Gallery Forum Box (2018). His works and collaborations have been featured in NeurIPS Creativity Workshop in Montreal, HIAP, Mustarinda, Field_Notes by Bio Art Society, AAVE Festival, RIXC Festival in Riga, Pixelache Festival, Hackteria - Biohack retreat in Klontale, HORSEANDPONY Fine Arts in Berlin, Kunsthalle Helsinki, Skaftfell Center for Arts Project Space in Seydisfjordur and Avatar Center in Quebec. 14
Generative Model UN, 2018, AI-designed flags, plexiglass
“The technologies that shape our lives represent an intriguing platform for speculation. They evoke an array of hypothetical futures drawn from both the dystopian and utopian ends of science fiction. I explore this evolving technological landscape by imagining futurist scenarios that reflect broader hopes and fears about the present.
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These thematic interests dovetail with my process. I am interested in navigating the fuzzy gray area between the digital and physical, and often use CAD software and laser cutting to translate digital designs into physical objects, and to embed video within hybrid media works.� -- Tyler Bohm
Tyle r Bohm Tyler Bohm is a new media artist who spent several years working in the architectural industry, where he adopted the tools and techniques of digital and physical modeling to create digitally-inspired sculptural, video and hybrid works. The resulting process, which involves traditional approaches such as painting mediated through a range of design technologies, is reflective of the technological themes explored in the work. In recent years, he has participated in exhibitions at Cue Art Foundation (New York), NURTUREart (Brooklyn), Equity Gallery (New York), Boston Cyberarts Gallery, Terrault Contemporary (Baltimore), Proto Gomez (New York), Icebox Project Space (Philadelphia), Trestle Gallery (Brooklyn), Weston Art Gallery (Cincinnati), Gallery Madison Park (New York), Proto Gallery (Hoboken, NJ), Plexus Projects (Brooklyn) and Ann Street Gallery (Newburgh, NY). His work has been covered in Two Coats of Paint, SciArt Magazine, E-Squared and Peripheral Vision Arts. He is a graduate of Kenyon College and Oxford University and lives in Columbus.
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Henry Brown Henry F. Brown was born and raised in New York City, a love of nature and outer space soon followed. He graduated from Kenyon College in 2007 and earned his Masters Degree in Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2015. He cofounded Overpass Projects – a traditional fine art print publisher in Providence, RI whose work has been collected by institutions such as the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, and the New York Public Library. He is currently teaching in the Printmaking Department at RISD and codirector of Salad Editions, an experimental fine art publisher with studios in Brooklyn, NY and Providence, RI.
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“I bring 19th century techniques together with 21st century concepts in order to explore the virtual and psychological spaces we inhabit. I explore the lineage of Western landscape aesthetics and find those concepts and compositional techniques present in fantasy-based RPG video games. Each print is an image of an original screencapture taken while playing a variety of first-person role playing games on PC. I seek to create spaces that engage the viewer in a reciprocating process of entering the image plane while simultaneously confronting the materials and illusions that construct it.� --Henry Brown
Detail of HUD_GIF_02, HUD_JPG_03, 2019, Photopolymer intaglio
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Chris Combs Chris Combs is an artist based in Washington, D.C who creates provocative technology. His solo exhibition, Judging Me Judging You, at the DC Arts Center's Nano Gallery explored themes of surveillance and control, and his work Markov Radio was included in a one-day Sound Scene event at the Hirshhorn Museum. He was a photo editor for National Geographic for five years and has photographed autism, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and traffic cones. He is a graduate of the Corcoran College of Art + Design. You can find his work at chriscombs.net.
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Morale is Mandatory, 2020, custom machine
“It only takes a weak signal to get segmented. Have you ever shopped for, say, a toilet part at an online bookseller and had it follow you around the internet? A dizzying array of “retargeting” companies and networks have a strong incentive to label you with a category, or segment, and a weaker incentive to un-label you. And who says how long these labels last? Toilet parts are just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine a world where reading about pot brownies affects your applicant score in a company’s H.R. system, or keeps you from getting a mortgage--or parole.” --Chris Combs
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I n f o
d e m i c Derek Curry + Jennifer Gradecki "'Infodemic' is a neural networkgenerated video that questions the mediated narratives created by social media influencers and celebrities about the coronavirus. The speakers featured in the video have spread misinformation about the coronavirus and are generated using a conditional generative adversarial network, which is used in some deepfake technologies. The dialogue is taken from academics, medical experts, and journalists. In the generated videos, the influencers deliver public service announcements or present news stories that counter the misinformation they have spread. The video’s painterly qualities evoke the mutation of the coronavirus, the instability of truth, and the limits of knowledge."
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Derek Curry Derek Curry is an artist-researcher whose work addresses spaces for intervention in automated decision-making systems. His work has addressed automated decision-making processes used by automated stock trading systems and Open Source Intelligence gathering (OSINT). His artworks have replicated aspects of social media surveillance systems and communicated with algorithmic trading bots. Derek holds an MFA in New Genres from UCLA’s Department of Art and a PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo. http://derekcurry.com/
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Curry and Gradecki are currently Assistant Professors at Northeastern University in Boston and have exhibited their work internationally at venues including Ars Electronica (Linz), New Media Gallery (Zadar), AC Institute (New York), Science Gallery Dublin, The New Gallery (Calgary), Critical Finance Studies (Amsterdam), ISEA (Vancouver), Athens Digital Art Festival, Radical Networks (Brooklyn), and the Centro Cultural de España (México). They have published in Big Data & Society, Visual Resources, and Leuven University Press. Their projects have been funded by Science Gallery Dublin, the Puffin Foundation, and the NEoN Festival (Scotland).
Je nn ifer Gradecki
Jennifer Gradecki is an artist-theorist whose work facilitates a practice-based understanding of sociotechnical systems that evade public scrutiny. Using methods from institutional critique, tactical media, and information activism, she investigates information as a source of power and resistance. Her investigations have focused on social science techniques, financial instruments, intelligence agencies, technologies of mass surveillance and artificial intelligence. She holds an MFA in New Genres from UCLA (2010) and a PhD in Visual Studies at SUNY Buffalo (2019). www.jennifergradecki.com
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Liliana Farber is a Brooklyn based Uruguayan artist. She had solo shows at 1708 gallery, Richmond, VA; Arebyte gallery, London; Dodecá Center, Marte UpMarket gallery, and MEC gallery, Montevideo, Uruguay. She participated in group shows at The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Portugal; The National Museum of Fine Arts, Chile; The National Museum of Visual Arts, Uruguay; Ars Electronica, Austria; WRO Media Art Biennale, Poland; Katonah Museum of Art, NY; Glassbox Art Space, Paris; and more. Farber received the Lumen Prize for Art and Technology, the Network Culture Award, Stuttgarter Filmwinter, and the Art and Technology Award, Montevideo City Hall.
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"Maps embody narratives and world perspectives. Atlases and charts visualize layered collections of data, sourced from different origins, compiled and modified to become canon as they survive the tests of time. In scholar John Pickles’ words, “Maps do not only represent a territory but produce it.” Historically, in addition to being used as tools for navigation, maps epistemologically define the world. They delineate hierarchies of power, what is accessible and what is beyond reach, what is real, and what is fiction. Maps are the tools of empires. Google Earth is no exception.
Liliana Farber
Terram in Aspectu, 2019, Digital Archival Inkjet Print
History has proven many world representations to be inaccurate, but there are still some data visualizations that seem to be almost raw, truthful, untouched by the biases of human interpretation. Satellite photography, as artist Aaron Rothman points out in “Beyond Google Earth,” has yet to earn our distrust. The combination of a god’s-eye perspective with automatic machine-made images, creates the illusion of a neutral and precise documentation. However, as Laura Kurgan explains in Up Close at a Distance: Mapping, Technology and Politics, “…there is no such thing as neutral data. Data are always collected for a specific purpose, by a combination of people, technology, money, commerce, and government.
The artwork ‘Terram in Aspectu’ scrutinizes the platform Google Earth and inquires into the room left for manipulation when using artificial intelligence technologies. The work consists of a series of phantom islands, bodies of land represented for many years in maps but proven to have never existed, recreated as satellite photography through a machine learning algorithm trained with images from Google Earth. The series explore Google Earth’s colonial ancestry and the fictional representation it creates by mechanical means, by rescuing discarded colonial maps of mistaken islands, and bringing them back to life, as if they were images taken from Google’s platform. " --Liliana Farber 26
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DEEP FAKE Installation View, L to R: Current, Morale is Mandatory, HUD_JPG_03, HUD_GIF_02
Ian Heisters Ian Heisters is a new media artist working with dance and installation. His works use digital film, custom software, and new technologies as entry points to an improvisation-based dance practice. A recurring theme of his work is the collision of social, political, and technological systems with our communities and bodies.
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Ian’s installations and performances have shown nationally and internationally at venues including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Root Division, Goldsmith’s University, CounterPULSE, and Links Hall. In addition to his art practice, Ian works as a researcher and advisor specializing in performance, digital media, mixed reality, deep learning, and sensor systems for projects with UC Berkeley, Jim Campbell, Camille Utterback, and the open source community. He is currently collaborating with Berlin-based StratoFyzika, was a member of Anna Halprin's performance lab for several years, and enjoyed a multi-year collaboration with Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts. A native of Northern California, he is based in the California Bay Area, where he tries to spend as much time as possible in the outdoors with his wife and two sons.
Gesture #3, 2018, Film
“Gestures is a series of films that consider how history and progress are encoded in the body. The films are made in a process of collaboration between the performers, an unreliable computer AI, and myself. Gesture #3 was performed by Sherwood Chen and Gabriel Christian in Richmond, California over the course of a single evening, after weeks of exhaustive rehearsal. I filmed their performance a couple dozen times, edited the raw footage, and passed the footage through custom software to generate a six-hour film.� --Ian Hesiters
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Laine Rettmer + Isabel Beavers "'Seydisfjordur Slates is a work from the collaborative e'xhibition 'MELT'. 'MELT' seeks to formulate a process through which illusion and icon become a simulacrum of origin and truth. In doing so, it broadens the idea of origin stories as based predominantly in the agency of male character. The work in MELT responds to Norse mythology and the phenomenological experience of the Icelandic landscape. Method and distribution both become unreliable mediators in this work that seeks to question the stability and authority of story. Seydisfjordur Slates are an archive of unsused ‘b-roll’ footage shot in on the Icelandic landscape. The USB drives store video clips: the characters who measured the Votnajokull Glacier with tape, created compositions of ice forms with red surveying stakes, drew in the snow with foot tracks, and performed rituals in geothermal caves. The characters at times overcome the physicality and vastness of the landscape—other times they are subsumed by it. The work integrates images of field-based video with 3D modeling, complicating what the viewer believes to be the site of the mythology. The technology then achieves what the human cannot: an omniscient if incomplete perspective on the site of the artists’ stories. This placement allows the viewer to believe in these new stories as myth and origin."
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Seydisfjordur Slates, 2019, Acrylic, USB drives
Laine Rettmer
Laine Rettmer is a North American visual artist and opera director. Their work explores performance, gender, desire, and methods of social control. Rettmer’s work has been presented nationally and internationally at the Vizcaya Museum; Manifesta; MoMA Public, curated by Mel Logan and Jakob Boeskov; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museum for the exhibition, Hot Steam; the Illuminus Festival; the Yuan Art Museum; Yve Yang Gallery; Perkins and Ping; Present Company; NADA NY, NADA Presents; and AREA gallery, among others.
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Recent awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and a MAP Fund grant for the collaborative opera, Standby Snow: Chronicles of a Heat Wave, an Art Alliance Fellowship from HFBK Hamburg, a research fellowship from the Center for Arts Design and Social Research, and residences at Skaftfell Center for Visual Arts in Iceland, Robert Wilson’s Watermill Foundation on Long Island, and MassArt’s Brant Gallery.
Isabel Beavers Her work has been exhibited at: SPRING/BREAK Art Show (2020)/ CultureHub LA (2020)/ SUPERCOLLIDER Gallery (2020)/ MIT Museum (2019)/ New York Hall of Science (2019)/ Icebox Project Space (2019)/ Boston Cyberarts Gallery (2019)/ Adelson Galleries (2019) / Art Science Exhibits, HumboldtUniversitat zu Berlin (2018). Mountain Time Arts (2017)/ Emerson Contemporary Media Arts Gallery (2017). Upcoming Exhibitions include Maiden LA (2020)/ San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (2021)/Torrance Art Museum (2021)/ Museum of Design Atlanta (2021).
Isabel Beavers is a multimedia artist and educator based in Los Angeles. Her work explores ecologies, examines environmental histories and postulates about climate futures through multimedia installation + new media. She is a co-founder of Great Pause Project, Sci Art Ambassador with Supercollider Gallery, and 2019-20 Resident Artist with CultureHub LA. Beavers recent work probes our cultural responses to climate change by exposing inequitable systems of thought and exploring the use of emerging technology for both scientific research and artistic expression. Recent projects investigate Arctic melt, Norse mythology, California mega-fires, Mars colonization, and artificial ecologies. Her work can be viewed at www.isabelbeavers.com. 34
Dasul Kim "Climate change, energy depletion, income inequality. The challenges we face today are not so simply solved. To solve the problems, we have to invest the same amount of time and energy as we did cause them. They cannot be solved in a day. So sometimes I imagine the future, wishing that it's beautiful. From superstitions to scientific endeavors, the human desire to know and change the future continues with time. I made a story for a chain calling. It contains mysterious suggestions for the future." --Dasul Kim
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Dasul Kim is an artist based in Seoul and Los Angeles. Her works reflect her interest in the underlying ideologies that govern and shape human ecology through the relationship between the built environment and nature. Through her works, Dasul highlights the duality of capitalism as a monstrous detriment to this relationship between people and nature. The artist equips herself with multiple mediums, such as text, sound, performance, and installations to convincingly express her interests. For her practice, element of chance plays a pivotal role in interweaving seemingly irrelevant and spontaneous, yet intimate, elements found in an individual’s life with social discourses. This platform pays homage to the motley black comedy with its emotional absurdity that criticizes society with silliness. Dasul’s playful pieces enjoy being kitsch.
May Luck Be With Your Future Self, 2019, Sound
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DEEP FAKE Installation View, L to R: Machina Baltica, Recoding Art
Heather Lowe Heather Lowe’s work has reached beyond color moiré to gradations of color and ground in diverse patterns that affect one another by altering hue or shape to generate the image of a wave, or cloud formations, or dancing figures, for example. The possibilities of painting on mirrored glass have been explored in her work, as well as the resources of unaided stereography. Her work in stereo photography has followed both lines, the blending of separate pictures and the composed or altered image. For the last fifteen years she has been extending these principles in lenticular media, most recently combining drawing, sculptural effects, morphing and animation.
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Her work has been exhibited widely, including a solo exhibition in Monaco, shows at bG Gallery, Shoebox Projects and solo exhibits at LA Artcore. She has also curated shows at various venues including Annenberg Beach House Gallery, Neutra Institute Gallery and Keystone Art Space. Most recently she completed an installation at the Helms Bakery District in Culver City called “Projecting Possibilities.” She was born in Santa Monica, studied at Santa Monica College, UC Santa Cruz, and San Francisco City College. She currently resides in Los Angeles, where she has a studio at Keystone Art Space.
"This project began as a kind of curiosity about the missing people ads I receive in the mail. I would tear them out from the coupon newsprint booklets stuffed in my mailbox every week. I’d look at the faces and wonder where these people came from and why they may have run away. Computer generated images speculating what they might look like in the future were disconcerting and made me think that perhaps if that’s what someone wanted them to become, maybe that’s why they ran away. I started to collect them. Stories and conjectures piled up. Now I have over 200 of these snippets that represent human lives. Much later I came upon an ad in an old magazine that asked, “Has your identity already been stolen?” and it seemed to belong with all these lost faces. I used a few of these clippings, blown up and in the spirit of identity, I decided to insert AI faces, modeling them, aging them and yes, sometimes trying to imbue them with soul."
--Heather Lowe AI JAZZMIN, 2019, Newsprint, Lencticular
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Annette Markham 41
"As we surf, swipe, click, and post, digital traces create temporal shadows behind us. As these data leave our bodies, they develop lives of their own. Tangling with other data, clusters of cultural significance are generated. As data formats change, or we cede personal and cultural memory to the machinic, the algorithmic, the corporate, what is transformed? What is remembered (re-membered), represented (re-presented)? In the age of AI, who or what has control of cultural memory, and with what consequence?
Algorithmic Gesturing troubles the idea of singular connections between memory and archives as well as the ethics of changing data formats. As an elderly woman tries to donate a memory to be archived—Germans occupying her Danish hometown during WWII, her story is continually interrupted, morphed, overlaid with multiple voices and images. While brief moments of her original videorecorded conversation might be glimpsed, most of the video data has been stripped to the gestural by a predictive algorithm that focuses only on the data points generated by her hand gestures and head movements. Audio overlays include excerpts from The Organic Notebooks (Agnes Denes), Staying with the Trouble (Donna Haraway), and the artist’s own essays. The consequent remix intends to raise questions about the complex politics of datafication of memories and the power of AI to morph and shift the shades and characters of cultural history." --Annette Markham This video is a remix by Annette Markham, adapted from excerpts of a 2018 audio/ video installation in Aarhus, Denmark, by Ann Light, Annette Markham, Mórna O’Connor, Robert Ochshorn, and Gabriel Pereira. The audio/video installation is part of The Museum of Random Memory, a series of arts-based research interventions (2016-2019) created by Diogo Agostinho, Dalida María Benfield, Chris Bratton, Martin Brynskov, Gita Chandra, Ramona Riin Dremljuga, JV Fuqua, Anu Harju, Elyzabeth Holford, Ksinnia Kalugina, Justin Lacko, Deborah Lanzeni, Bente Larsen, Ann Light, Kristjan Maalt, Larisa Kingston Mann, Annette Markham, Nathália Novais, Robert Ochshorn, Mórna O’Connor, Kasper Ostrowski, Gabriel Pereira, Mads Rehder, Sarah Schorr, Andrew Sempere, Sava Saheli Singh, Maria Hougaard Sørensen, Kristoffer Thyrrestrup, and Elizabeth Whitney. Voice and video of Trine Le Febour was recorded in 2017 by MoRM researchers at CounterPlay Festival in Denmark. Annette Markham is a digital culture researcher and well-known scholar focused on ethics and politics of digital identity and technology design. Annette has facilitated, founded, or directed international initiatives that combine scholarly activism, public arts interventions and critical pedagogy, such as the Skagen Institute for Transgressive Methods (2013-), the Future Making Research Consortium (2014-), The Museum of Random Memory (2016-2019), and in the early days of the 2020 pandemic, Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking, in response to the impact of COVID-19 on everyday lived experience. Primarily a writer, she is author of many short and long form works, including the book Life online: Researching real experience in virtual space (Alta Mira, 1998) and the edited collections Internet inquiry: Conversations about method (Sage, 2009, with Nancy Baym), and Metaphors of internet: Ways of being in the age of ubiquity (Peter Lang, 2020, with Katrin Tiidenberg). Originally from the United States, Annette currently holds an appointment as Professor of media studies and communication and co-director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Learn more at https://annettemarkham.com or https://futuremaking.space Opposite Page: Still from Algorithmic Gestures, 2020, Video
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Recoding Art
Still from Recoding Art, 2019, Video
Bruno Moreschi + Gabriel Pereira “The video “Recoding Art” revolves around our research, which involved creating a platform that centralized 7 comercial Artificial Intelligences to read the contemporary art collection of the Van Abbemuseum (NL). In the results, we looked for glitches, errors and unexpected readings. We thus sought to reframe the use of machine intelligence, investigating what alternative positionalities we can assume by focusing on what’s usually considered “just an error”. Much like the theme of “DEEP FAKE”, the novel epistemological and ethical quandaries that emerge around AI are our focus, especially when they concern our relation to arts/ museums. We found that the glitches of AI are potentially revealing of the art system, and even poetic at times. They also reveal the inherent fallibility of the commercial use of AI and machine learning to catalogue the world: it cannot comprehend other ways of knowing about the world, outside the logic of the algorithm (and capitalism). At the same time, due to their “glitchy” capacity to put everything in the same level, these “faulty” readings can also serve as a new way of reading art; a new way for thinking critically about the art image in a moment when visual culture has changed form to hybrids of humanmachine cognition and “machine-tomachine seeing.” 44
Bruno Moreschi
Bruno Moreschi is a researcher and multidisciplinary artist. He currently is a Postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo (FAUUSP), with a PhD in Arts at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), with a Capes scholarship, and exchange at the University of Arts of Helsinki (Kuva Art Academy), Finland, via CIMO Fellowship. His academic and artistic investigations are related to the deconstruction of systems and the decoding of their procedures and social practices – including here (but not only) experiences in the visual arts system and its spaces of legitimation. He currently conducts experiments in the field of Artificial Intelligence, in reverse engineering processes to carry out expanded practices of institutional critique and studies on human layers present in the training and maintenance of contemporary digital infrastructures. Projects recognized by scholarships, exhibitions and institutions such as Van Abbemuseum, 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, Rumos Award, Funarte, Capes and Fapesp. He is currently a researcher on the Histories of AI: Genealogy of Power (Cambridge University), senior researcher at the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research (CAD+SR) and one of the coordinators of GAIA / C4AI/Inova USP, a group of researchers from different fields in the construction of democratic, artistic and experimental methods in the use of programming, machine learning and Artificial Intelligences. 45
Gabriel Pereira
Gabriel Pereira is a Brazilian researcher and PhD Fellow at Aarhus University (Denmark). Using methods that creatively blend science and technology theories with artistic practice, his research investigates taken-for-granted data and algorithm infrastructures. His PhD research focuses in understanding how computer vision algorithms mediate our relationship with the world, and what these mediations make possible (or impossible). The research methods he deploys are experimental and collaborative, involving both forms of qualitative research (e.g. ethnography) and different forms of practice-based inquiry (e.g. arts-based, interventionist). In 2018-2019, he was a visiting Graduate Student at MIT’s Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab, collaborating with research projects of the center. Previous collaborations with Bruno Moreschi include the History of _rt project (http://historyof-rt.org/) and a commissioned project for the 33rd São Paulo Art Biennial (https://outra33. bienal.org.br/en/). He is currently a Researcher in Residence at the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research. 46
Jeroen vanLoon Jeroen van Loon (b. 1985 in ’s Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands, lives and works in Utrecht, NL) received a bachelor in Digital Media Design and a European Media Master of Arts from the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht. His work revolves around revealing and documenting digital culture.
His work has been displayed in solo exhibitions and international group shows and has earned him a European Youth Award and a KF Hein art grant. Recent work is included in the Verbeke Foundation collection. Recent exhibitions include Transmediale’s Alien Matter 2017, “cellout.me” at Aksioma, “Beyond Data” Central Museum, Dutch Design Week,“Design my Privacy” Z33, Cyberfest 9, Russia/USA/Colombia and V2_, The Netherlands
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Fake News, 2018, Video
On 10 April 2018 Mark Zuckerberg had to testify before the US Congress. Fake News shows the entire hearing on three different screens. What has been added to the video are various face filters, which are commonly used to add an augmented reality layer to your selfie photos or videos. Each face filter, depending on the context it’s used in, can have different meanings.
In 'Fake News', the face filters are used to visually critique Zuckerberg and the members of the Senate committee on their vision about fake news, the privacy of Facebook users and the possible future regulation of Facebook. Fake News shows a more honest depiction of the shifting power balance between tech companies and politics. 'Fake News' was made possible by the generous support of the KF Hein Fonds and IMPAKT.
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Eli Joteva + Provides Ng + Artem Konevskikh + Ya Nzi "Current is a speculation on the future of broadcasting cinema. It emerges from the intersection of contemporary trends in livestream culture, volumetric cinema, AI deep fakes and personalized narratives. The film Current is an experiential example of what this cinema might look and feel like within a few years based on the convergence of these trends. Artificial intelligence increasingly molds the clay of the cinematic image, optimizing its vocabulary to project information in a more dynamic space, embedding data in visuals, and directing a new way of seeing: from planar to global, flat to volumetric, personal to planetary. ‘Current’ experimented with a range of digital technologies that are readily available to any individuals (i.e. livestream data, machine learning, 3D environment reconstruction, ubiquitous computing, pointclouds). It developed a production pipeline using distributed technologies, which provide a means for individuals to reconstruct, navigate and understand event landscapes that are often hidden from us, such as violence in protests, changes in nordic animals behaviors, the handling of trash, etc.. This infinite stack of moving images and its aesthetic are not just supplemental
visual effects but imply a new form of distributed economy, where the line of authorship between viewer and producer gets increasingly obscured. We see this open-source cinema as a new form of infrastructure, which circulates attention, visibility and data as its values. This implies an economy that has potential in multiple streams beyond social media, as the content deep learns from itself."
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Current
Still from Current, 2020, Film
Provides Ng E l i Joteva
Eli Joteva is a Bulgarian media artist and researcher based in Los Angeles. With a practice rooted in photography and digital media, her work traces the translations between material and virtual planes in an effort to re-imagine the experiences of both human and other-than-human bodies. She holds an MFA from UCLA Design | Media Arts, a BA in Fine Arts from USC Roski and completed The New Normal postgraduate research program at Strelka. She has been a resident artist at Vermont Studio Center, ACRE, Photo+Sphere and an active member of UCLA Art Sci Center | Lab since 2016. She is currently artist in residence at STEAM Imaging III.
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Provides Ng was trained as an architect and a researcher. Her research concerns the emergence of digital tools and their impacts on architecture and urbanism. Her current research discusses how large-scale computation prompts a ‘preemptive urbanism’, where AI and big data are tools to predictively model parallel futures that guide our design strategies. In her design work, she experiments with multimedia narratives and communication technologies, which expands the spectrum of architectural representation.
Yanzi Artem Konevskikh Artem Konevskikh studied computer science and then applied this knowledge in the field of experimental particle physics by developing data acquisition systems and doing data analysis for CERN and Institute for Nuclear Research RAS. He is also one of the founders of the makerspace Physics Kunstkamera in Troitsk, Moscow, where he teaches advanced technologies for rapid prototyping and software development. Artem is currently working at Strelka KB, where he is developing urban analysis tools as well as collaborating on artistic and research projects to implement artificial intelligence and neural networks into the design processes.
Yanzi is a multidisciplinary artist based in Moscow. Emerged from the VFX and animation industries, Yanzi specializes in using visual manipulation tools. These digital tools and their side effects are one of his key concerns. In his practice, Yanzi doesn’t stick to a single medium, but chooses what best fits his utterance. Yanzi is interested in technologies, ideology, contemporary mythology, skateboarding, interfaces and crooked-coordinate-systems. On the basis of solid theoretical background, scientific, forensic, and artistic methods are his arsenal for working on modern world issues.
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About the Curator
Isabel Beavers is a multi-media artist and educator based in Los Angeles. Her work explores ecologies, examines environmental histories and postulates about climate futures through multimedia installation + new media. Beavers’ work has been presented, exhibited, and screened at New York Hall of Science (2020), CultureHub LA (2020), SUPERCOLLIDER Gallery (2020), MIT Museum (2019), Icebox Project Space (2019), Framingham State University (2018), Humbolt-Universität zu Berlin Thaer-Institut (2018), Mountain Time Arts (2017), Emerson Media Arts Center (2017) among others. She has held workshops at the Hammer Museum (2020) and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (2019). She holds an MFA from the SMFA at Tufts University and a BS from the University of Vermont. She is currently a 2019-20 Resident Artist with CultureHub LA and 2020 SciArt Ambassador with SUPERCOLLIDER Gallery. She is currently Youth Development Specialist with artworxLA.
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Our 21st century problems and opportunities cut across all dimensions of life; in order to create comprehensive and inclusive solutions and innovations, we need cross-disciplinary approaches. At SciArt Initiative, we support and foster active exchange between all disciplines by using the platforms of art to build connections, create shared experiences, spark collaboration, and envision our futures.
SUPERCOLLIDER believes in a future where art, science, and tech collide to inspire social and environmental responsibility. We bring together leading artists, scientists, and the public to celebrate the future and reframe the challenges facing our world. In this process, we build accountability networks and creative connection across disciplines and locations to spark new skill sets for humanity: collective perseverance and collaborative action. Our mission is to drive persistent conversation about the future of our home planet. Out of sight, out of mind can no longer define our pursuit of progress. We bring such topics in-sight and in-mind, with art at the forefront.
About the Partners 54
