Deadlines:
School for Poetic Computation in NYC, fall 2019, where I was introduced to OpenFrameworks
In 2005 at the MIT Media Lab, as part of a women-in-engineering program for middle schoolers, a woman presented fifteen sixth-graders with a table full of conductive thread, felt, and LEDs. She taught them how to sew circuits. Afterward, one of the girls raced home, burst through the door, threw a strip of red felt at her dad, and urged him, “Put it on! Put it on!” When the two ends of her delicately sewn creation wrapped around his wrist, the bracelet lit up, studded with twinkling LEDs. The circuit was complete.
Though many years have passed since I made that LED bracelet, my belief in technology’s ability to make magic has never left.
I've been thinking about memory, history that is relayed and recounted by family members through the foggy lens peering through generations past. And why I use AI in my work... As an artist using AI, you experience an extreme loss of control when you put several hundred ""representative"" images of a subject or theme into a neural network.
The process often goes like: You put in what fragments of an idea or theme you can scrape together, something unexpected always comes out of the machine, and you try to piece it all together. Sometimes it makes sense, often it doesn't.
It's a similar feeling to when you're grasping for a stable story about generations past, and you're left with a feeling of loss and unrecoverable truth.
I used a dataset of papercuts
“Emergence” is about ancestry, time, and remembrance, as it relates to my Chinese-American heritage. The basis of the series is a dataset of Chinese papercuts that I collected and curated.
The special thing about “Emergence” is that each piece emerges from a different moment in time in the training loop of a GAN. Nonetheless, it’s clear when you look at them that all the pieces share the same DNA— they are all of the same lineage, of the same family tree.