engine errors / self-portraits
digital prints with video mapped projection — prints: 11"x17", total: 16' x 12'
medium: digital prints with video mapped projection
dimensions: prints: 11"x17" total: 16’ x 12’.
Engine Errors/Self-portrait is a series of digital renderings with overlayed projection video taken from my solo exhibition, Invisible Choirs << click here to goto exhibition website >>
In this piece, an autoencoder (neural net) is trained on a facial images of Chinese engineering students to teach the computer how to generate portraits. This piece treats the network’s 'errors' as a medium in itself. Instead of correcting the system's failures, I use them--its smears, averages, and glitches--as the medium, testifying to how emerging technologies operate as a form of erasure. In this case, the ghostly images reflect a sort of racial blurring, a tendency to aggregate and reduce people of Asian descent to automatons, tech workers devoid of individual identity. I project my own facial features on top of these images to create a composite cyborg: part human, part machine, part ghost.
example portraits 汉语
footage from show
back to nolanlem.com
dimensions: prints: 11"x17" total: 16’ x 12’.
Engine Errors/Self-portrait is a series of digital renderings with overlayed projection video taken from my solo exhibition, Invisible Choirs << click here to goto exhibition website >>
In this piece, an autoencoder (neural net) is trained on a facial images of Chinese engineering students to teach the computer how to generate portraits. This piece treats the network’s 'errors' as a medium in itself. Instead of correcting the system's failures, I use them--its smears, averages, and glitches--as the medium, testifying to how emerging technologies operate as a form of erasure. In this case, the ghostly images reflect a sort of racial blurring, a tendency to aggregate and reduce people of Asian descent to automatons, tech workers devoid of individual identity. I project my own facial features on top of these images to create a composite cyborg: part human, part machine, part ghost.
example portraits 汉语
Engine Errors / Self-Portrait Projection Excerpt from Nolan Lem on Vimeo.
footage from show
back to nolanlem.com