#digital algorithmic image

Abstract photographies composed by blending images from Facebook friend suggestion albums into single pictures. Using custom made software, each original image selected by the Facebook algorithms is stacked on top of each other, and different sets for different human body features as detected by feature detection algorithms are condensed into separate emotional impressions by processing their mean color value per pixel. Thus, each picture is a digital mixture of both algorithms as they work around our digital presence.

Each final image captures the logic of human body feature detection algorithms but also fuses it with a distant, shadow view of digital body feature representations of people "You May Know", selected by another set of Facebook algorithms running on the shadow-profile user interactions. All those uncanny recommendations are digital shadows that constantly follow our virtual avatars, as they move around inside cyberspace, casted by the constant light of network activity surveillance.

The digital images were created by bulk downloading 9000 images downloaded from Facebook friend suggestion albums for my personal account. All images were then stacked using custom made software to process their mean color value per pixel, and increase the dynamic range of colors retaining the highest of their original detailed variety. They were also centered and rescaled at the same size of different human body features, as recognized by feature detection trained neural networks using the OpenCV library.

Using a high number of original images the effect of the body feature detection algorithm is much more pronounced, but by using a lower number of images it is possible to make the Facebook friend suggestion algorithm effects more visible. The final image captures different symmetries between those two algorithms, depending on the number of images used each time.

Fullbody.

Fist.

Hand.

Lowerbody.

Mouth.

Upperbody.

Exhibited on the featured artists section of The Wrong - New Digital Art Biennale 3.0: "Anestis Anestis" (November 2017 -January 2018)

The digital images were created by bulk downloading 9000 images downloaded from Facebook friend suggestion albums ( http://www.facebook.com ) for my personal account. All images were then stacked using custom made software to process their mean color value per pixel, and increase the dynamic range of colors retaining the highest of their original detailed variety. They were also centered and rescaled at the same size of different human body parts, as recognized by feature detection trained neural networks using the OpenCV library.

Software written in Processing. Processing is an open source programming language and environment, originally built in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab as a domain-specific extension to Java, targeted towards artists and designers. http://www.processing.org/ http://www.processing.org/exhibition/

In the age of decisions taken by artificial technocracies -soon to be replaced by algorithms and AI's- politics is fragmentary and illusory, it has become an algorithmic blending of abstract and distant, complex and opaque cybernetic layers of bureaucracies made of human and artificial control networks. Shadows of the political decisions disputed, and fuzzy familiar human faces are still visible through that thick mist of opaque transactions. That mist is slowly devouring everything in a very simple idea dominating the landscape of governance: that all human networks are computational in nature, and that just fusing more and more data with them will help us build a better tomorrow. But the more data we dump and push into our models, the more our understanding of the World becomes fuzzier.

Look at Donald Trump and Boris Johnson for example. Composed of the same anti-globalist fragments they are still recognizable, but not as the familiar faces we all know. They do not represent people, neither ideas, neither themselves, instead they fade into digital shadows casted by obscure technocracies they cannot control. Politicians are becoming avatars loosely coupled with politics itself.

How to make decisions when no knowledge of what is conceivable is possible, how to take a political position in the face of events that have no truth value, they are not even real or fake as they do not occur in the plane of tangible human experience?

Abstract photographic portraits of World politicians composed using the multitude of images returned by Google image searches blended into one single picture. Using custom made software, each image returned by Google is stacked on top of each other, and the total set of the query results is condensed into a single emotional impression. Each pixel captures the light and color details of numerous original images, and the huge algorithmic details displayed in large dimensions challenge the viewer to fuse his physiological perceptions with their digital representations in a world of big data.

The digital portraits are part of a large series which makes a historic reference to the evolution of Modernist landscape painting, from Pointillism -a painting method developed by neo-impressionists analogous to the four-color CMYK printing process- to Abstract Expressionism. Those references highlight the consistency of human perception in the analog and digital domains, where the Pointillist distinct dots of color capturing multiple lights and colors have now become pixels generated in a way that creates the same condensed effect. The clustering of many different images portraying the same query term on a large size print is also a reference to Claude Monet’s impressionist method of painting the same scene many times to capture the essence of passing seasons, trying also to immerse the viewer into grand scale landscape paintings. And from a distance, the effect is also similar to experiencing large-scale canvases by Color Field abstractionists like Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman.

Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel.

United Kingdom. Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

France. President Emmanuel Macron.

France. President of the National Rally political party Marine Le Pen.

United States. President Donald Trump.

Russia. President Vladimir Putin.

North Korea. Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un.

China. President Xi Jinping.

Installation Views

Typical Installation View.

Typical Installation View.

To further enhance the eerie feeling of the installation, each image can be accompanied by a corresponding sound that plays at very low-intensity, and can be heard from about a meter away, and shorter. This audio is a remix of downloaded public speeches, interviews and announcements from every politician, and sounds fuzzy and noisy, exactly like the images. Its similarity with white noise, causes it to work in a hypnotic way to keep the viewer immersed even more into an experience of something familiar yet extremely distant. Ideally the prints should be hanging in a dark room with the speakers behind them, at the height of the typical viewer.

Large Installation View with sound.

Large Installation View with sound.

Sound samples.

Participation of the Work

Posted on Phases Magazine: "This is not a Group" (10 June 2018)

Posted on iGNANT: "Layered Images Of The G8 World Leaders" (17 July 2018)

Posted on Collater.al: "G8 world leaders portraits" (25 July 2018)

Published on

DIE ZEIT

:

"Angela Merkel: Kennen wir sie?"

(18 February 2021)

Technique

Each digital image was created by bulk downloading the first 400 images returned by Google image search ( http://images.google.com/ ) using each of the politician's name as query term. All primary images were then stacked using custom made software to process their mean color value per pixel, and increase the dynamic range of colors retaining the richness of their original detailed variety. No manual pre-selection of images or any post-production corrections have been made, but additional algorithms for face detection were used during the stacking process to reposition and resize any detected face around a central cluster. This process creates artifacts that enhance the feeling of the algorithms as force fields which alter reality. The next image and animation display the effects of using various input data sets (different years and search engines) as well as clustering parameters.

Divination methods are maps of subconscious elements, tangible structures and the projected patterns and relationships between them. The interplay between objective patterns and their subjective representations happens in a fuzzy, cloudy area of instinctive, primeval understanding of the world. It's not about knowing the absolute Truth, but about feeling the elaborate, diffuse network of relationships and transformations underneath it.

The archetypal dreamy images of Tarot cards are one of the best examples of a divination system used to generate interpretations by referring to this fuzzy experience of transformation, where cognition always flows in an interpretative stream of consciousness. It’s not about truth or about the future. It’s about primal instincts and feeling associations of connections, and the Major Arcana cards are a popular representation of these subconsciously programmed archetypes that mirror the human condition by suggestion of symbolic metaphors.

Major Arcana.

The Chariot and The Hanged Man.

The Devil and The Star.

The Empress and The Emperor.

The Fool and Death.

The Hermit and The World.

The Hierophant and The Lovers.

The Sun and The Moon.

Using custom image processing software I recreated the complete Major Arcana using an alchemic distillation method: loading transformations and progressive stacking of original raw internet images. The Tarot card set was created by bulk downloading the first 1000 images returned by internet image searches (google, bing, duckduckgo, imgur, flickr and openclipart) using the card names as query terms. All images were then mixed to their per pixel mean color value using custom software to process them.

Software written in Processing. Processing is an open source programming language and environment, originally built in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab as a domain-specific extension to Java, targeted towards artists and designers. http://www.processing.org/ http://www.processing.org/exhibition/