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As an artist, I'm interested in culling visual data about a person not to marginalize but reveal what we communicate about ourselves on a conscious and subconscious level. These portraits are erased and modified images from Facebook profiles. Using basic face recognition and simple action scripts in Photoshop each person is randomly replaced by the visual data in the surrounding of the person. The body is removed and transformed into a shadow portrait. Like the experience of Prosopagnosia, the face becomes a mixed jumbled blur of other people, places, and things. The photograph becomes a scrambled record reviling a split and a closer look at the digital ego.
As identifying a person becomes almost instantaneous with Deep Face and Google Face recognition, which can identify a person with their back turned toward the camera. Social media such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. become more intertwined in the way we communicate as a modern society. We leave a digital trail of our personal information, contacts, photographs, and life events. As we interact with social media the defining line between us and other blurs as information about our friends, our families, even our children get pulled into the data surrounding our digital-self. Our identity as an individual becomes a profiled caricature of information.
Installed in the basement of a gallery, Terralucida is an interactive audio and video installation incorporating live audio from a cricket cage controlling a time-lapsed duel channel video. Appearing as a night sky this video is controlled with the sound of the crickets advancing the one track of video transparently onto another copy of the video. The experience of the piece is at times quite peaceful and contemplative similar to the experience of stargazing.
Detail of Installation
In a mash between old meets new media, this crude apparatus replicates human vision. Duel closed circuit video screens mounted on a stereoscope allow the viewer to see the flat screens in real-time 3D. By bridging the obsolete to the modern, this project is about the way we use technology to frame and understand. As smartphones and small screens in our pockets become a modern tool informing the way we interact with a place, group of people, or event. This simple machine is about the phenomenon of how technologies continue shape our experience while presenting a simultaneous opportunity connect and detach.
Detail of Installation
Dimming of the Earth’s atmosphere due to particulate pollution and urban sprawl from cities makes it almost impossible to experience the night sky in our own backyards. In this work, manipulated maps of star constellations and satellite images space of the Earth at night create a simulated star-scape. Centered in the manipulated Milky Way includes lights from cities such as Los Angeles, Johannesburg, Tokyo, New Delhi, and New York. As we loose the experience to look into the night sky with infinite awe and wonder at the stars visually this work is about void. The black hole surrounding the frame of these images disappears and the dark circle becomes similar to the experience of looking through a telescope.
