BITS AND PIECES

A human being does not come with a black box,
An autopsy, maybe, to determine the cause of the end,
And even then it’s coded into a fragile piece of organic matter
That might be arrived at too soon, too late,
In too many pieces.

In Bits and Pieces, the artist uses machine learning to create self portraits from performances made solely for the algorithm. Each performance reflects an expression of feeling related to psychological and emotional malfunction which then becomes fodder for GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) to re-represent the human ‘better’.

Once the human has been broken down into slices of video, stills, bits and pieces of data, she is recomposed, relearned, and reformed by a machine learning model into something that is free of reality and its constraints.

In Performance III the GAN recreates the artist’s performance of depression. In the performance, the artist smothers herself in blue paint, distorting natural form and preventing the self from being fully exposed to the world outside.