Smiling in a Room

Alvin Lucier meets FaceApp

June 2017 - online

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A photo of Alvin Lucier is uploaded to FaceApp’s smile generator 300 times. Very quickly another face emerges. Is this the original smile?

A sequel, of sorts, to Sitting Instagram, inspired as ever by I Am Sitting In A Room where Lucier recorded a recording of his voice in a room over and over until all that was left was the resonance, the echoes, of the room, revealing it’s structure through sound alone.

More experiments with digital images at the Birmingham Open Media lab:

A tour around my face: Portrait photography with a microscope. (2017)

Smiling in a Room: Alvin Lucier meets FaceApp (2017)

R(AW)NN: New Robert Anton Wilson texts generated by a Recurrent Neural Network (2017)

Pictures from Dorian Gray: Generating images from a novel using an AI system trained on a photographic archive. (2017)

SIMULACRAMOMA: Maximum object detection on the Moma collection. (2017)

Five David Bowie videos, focus-stacked: Merging music videos (2017)

Auto-blending 2016: Focus-stacking the "best of" photos from news sites. (2016)

Fuck Your Flags: Pixel-sorting the nations of the world into irrelevance. (2016)

t-SNE: Algo-sorting images into aesthetically pleasing grids. (2016)

Foot Camera: Filming a walk with a camera stuck to my shoe (2016)

648 Members of Parliament: All the MPs all at once. (2016)

Golan Levin's Experimental Capture Workshop: An intensive summer school in Aspen. (2016)

Koyaanisqatsi Slitscanned: Swapping the horizontal and temporal axes on a movie. (2016)

Spinning Logos: Destroying corporate sigils using JPEG compression. (2016)

Instabeck: Imagining a lost sculpture using Instagram images (2015)

The Deep Dream of Narcissus: Commentary on Google's Deep Dream machine learning prototype. (2015)

Watchmen, by Brightness: Sorting the panels from the comic book Watchmen by their computated brightness. (2015)

Sitting In Stagram: I am logged into an Instagram account, identical to the one you are in now. (2015)

Which Am I Most Like? Typologies: Exploring shitpic aesthetics through cataloguing a meme. (2015)

Supper Room: Spinning the Last Supper (2015)

Birmingham Open Media Fellowship: Fellowship at arts organisation at intersection of art, technology and science. (2014)

I Am Spinning In A Room: Degrading a selfie by rotating it thousands of times. (2014)

Spectral Songs of the Slitscanned Selfies: What do selfies sound like? (2014)

Flatland Selfies: What do self-portraits look like in one dimension? (2014)

Typologies of Hypernetworked Vernacular Self-Portraiture: A video essay about selfies. (2014)

Next art:

A tour around my face

June 2017: Portrait photography with a microscope.

Previous art:

Spectrographic Manifestoes

June 2017: Election speeches transformed from audio to graphical and back again.