IDENTITIES

​

We have built a society based on sharing information about ourselves and involving others in our most private moments of life. This has become possible because of the large steps in technological evolution, leading to the worldwide use of affordable devices and social media.

Our identity is not only shared and observed by people, we now co-exist with artificial intelligence. As most sci-fi authors have told us over time, AI was developed to help us in our lives and facilitate the completion of our tasks, it also has a percentage of control and studies our behavior or, in some circumstances, our physical identity. We can observe these phenomena from the comfort of our home when search engines register online activity and consequently provide the user with content relevant to the input. Another familiar example is the facial recognition system which is now used to unblock personal devices such as smartphones or to perform digital signatures. Facial recognition systems have also been deployed in advanced human-computer interaction, video surveillance, and automatic indexing of images.

Being in daily contact with computers influences our behavior. Our continuous use of technology is modifying our thought stream and reality, in the same way, we have adapted technology to our needs, we have also adapted to the need of it. A cycle has begun in which artificial intelligence is inspired by human behavior and also has a direct effect on it. The computer brain is a reflection of our own, and the beauty of algorithms is set by human logic. We can observe an artificial reflection of ourselves to which we relate because of the similarity with its creator.

​

Computing has entered the art world and is used by artists to create visions reflecting our modern time and the technological breakthroughs describing it. With the advent and dissemination of Artificial Intelligence technologies in Contemporary Art, the question of digital aesthetics has arisen and we must face how our sensory perception of the world might be changed by a more ‘digital culture’.

My ‘IDENTITIES’ was created during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. I was inspired, if not led, by the digital aesthetics of this era including the work of great contemporary artists who use AI and Generative Adversarial Network to create mesmerizing art pieces. My transformational portrait has been influenced by the process behind machine learning and facial recognition, I have made use of several photographic portraits and isolated various facial features into sections to interpret the identity of a persona, just as a computer would do. The transitions within the moving portrait recall the fluidity with which we transform emotionally. In this case, it is the artist who is behaving like a computer to show her emotional self.

​

The work consists of a 10-minute-long video clip running in a loop, with the addition of sound effects and a melody created with a synthesizer so to complement the moving image and allow it to break free from the containment of a screen. The audience is no longer offered the single-point perspective of the film but is instead enveloped within a three-dimensional space. The beginning and the end are not pronounced, it is focused on the present. Inspired by the works of Bill Viola and ‘come out’ by Steve Reich, the video and sound are worked with feedback between images and between oscillators, the tempo is voluntarily distorted so to achieve a gradual and unexpected result. The piece is developed by video-recording the process of digital painting, editing the exported video, then working on the result with Touch Designer. The

Displace TOP in Touch Designer causes one image to be warped by another image, a pixel of the output image gets its RGBA value from a different pixel of the Source Image by using the second input image (the Displace Image). The sound was added later, although there was the possibility to make the video reactive to sound, I decided for the sound to appear to be reactive to the video. The image its self recalls the aesthetics of Flemish portraits and that of new technology aesthetics.

The technical research behind it includes digital painting, matte painting, video editing, pixel displacement, sound design, and musical production.

The applications and software I made use of include: Procreate, iMovie, Touch Designer, SynthOne, and Logic Pro.

I admire and have been inspired by artists and philosophers such as Refik Anadol, 404 collective, Dmitry Morozov, Bill Viola, Tomas Saraceno, Steve Reich, John Cage, Immanuel Kant, and Marleau Ponty.

​

​