Friends

Countless people who do not exist are staring at us.

In December 2018, NVIDIA shook the world by showing how easily Artificial Intelligence can create ultra-realistic portraits of people who do not exist.

Friends leverages the results of this research and offers an immersive experience experimenting with the massive amount of AI-generated content. By using a mobile phone, countless faces are generated and stare at the user from any direction. All the ordinary looking portraits of people are fake: they are randomly generated by AI.

The portraits are projected into a navigable 3D environment and rotate so that they are constantly looking at the user, to reference social media profile images.

Today’s social media users are constantly confronted by platforms that seek to profile their interests (likes, follower and follower counts…) in order to generate endless profit. These platforms have become the world’s de facto communication and information access tools, the mediums through which we connect with each other and learn about the world. Platforms that are designed primarily to generate as much engagement and growth as possible. How can we better understand – and thus potentially withstand – how these systems influence who we are and what we do? What are the techniques of resistance? Should we spam our profiles with continuously changing fake content to manipulate their algorithms?

At the same time, Friends aims to reflect on the disruptive potential of AI and its broad applications. By placing the accent on the ethics of AI, Friends reminds us of the moral implications underlying some of the controversial uses of the new technology: from data ethics to the fear of “machines taking over the world”. As we are nowhere close to being ruled by ma-chines, there have indeed been instances of society ruined by bad data. And if a morally and ethically ruled AI is what we need, should AI in the arts be moral and ethical? Or should art constantly strive to bypass society’s moral and ethical boundaries?

Using a mobile phone or tablet, countless portrait images are randomly integrated into the app via HTTP requests. They all watch me constantly. Each portrait receives a random first and last name, three letters each. The animations and sounds follow the movements of the user: the virtual environment rotates when the user rotate the device. The sky appears when the device is moved upwards. By tilting the device downwards, the floor appears. The virtual environment is endless and can be navigated in every direction.

The sound is composed for the app and reacts responsive to all these movements and navigation speeds.

The Mobile App display can be projected on one or more walls in the exhibition space.

CREDITS

Marc Lee and Shervin Saremi (Sound)

WEBSITE

http://marclee.io/en/friends/