DESCRIPTION: Make a piece based on your identity, yourself using some form of AI, for example a self portrait or a selfie or some other form that encapsulates an aspect of your identity.
BE PREPARED to discuss this creation in class or on discord next week.
COURSE NAMING CONVENTIONS FOR DIGITAL FILES: YearSemester_CourseTitle_NameOfActivity_FirstLastName.fileformat Ex: 24FA_AI_Identity_JorgeMendoza.doc
INSPIRATION: NarGIFsus: This is an exhibition co-curated by Carla in 2016, pre-dating much use of AI in image production. Still there are some hilarious digital takes (check out the fan as selfie) in this collection of work.
Some articles that may be helpful in your thinking about yourself
THE SCIENCE OF SELF: "What Is a 'Self'? Here Are All the Possibilities" by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, 2016, Live Science https://www.livescience.com/57126-what-is-a-self-all-possibilities.html
AI AVATAR SELFIES: “How Is Everyone Making Those A.I. Selfies?" by By Madison Malone Kircher and Callie Holtermann, 2022, NY Times https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/style/lensa-ai-selfies.html
FACIAL EXPRESSIONS IN SELFIES: "AI and the American Smile How AI misrepresents culture through a facial expression." by Jenka, 2023, Medium https://medium.com/@socialcreature/ai-and-the-american-smile-76d23a0fbfaf
SELF IDENTITY, SELFIE HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY: "THE 'Selfie' Phenomenon as a Basis for Self-Identity Search. Preamble to a Philosophy of the Selfie Photography" by Sylvia Borissova and Liliana Yakovleva, 2020, Philosophy
OBJECT ORIENTED PHILSOPHY & NARCISSISM: "The I in Object: Selfie Culture and Object-Oriented Philosophy"
ANTHROPOLOGICAL: "The Origins of Self An Anthropological Perspective" by Martin P.J. Edwardes , UCL Digital Press https://ucldigitalpress.co.uk/Book/Article/91/115/6744/
FACE TRACKING: "Working with Faces: A journey into the art of face analysis and classification. by Kyle McDonald, Medium https://kcimc.medium.com/working-with-faces-e63a86391a93
EXAMPLES: Carla Gannis: "self portraits as a wwwunderkammer" 2022
Description: "So I've been thinking about 'mixed media art,' about 7,810,000 Google results and the possibilities of "mixed algorithm art" 1 Google result. Over the past two days, I trained midjourney AI on 'wwwunderkammer, wunderkammer, cabinet of curiosity, cabinets of curiosity, feminism, decolonization, futuristic, hyperreal'. I trained Lensa AI on photos of me ranging from 6 years old until now. I then used the images generated from both of these platforms in playform AI (a platform I have been using since the early days of 2019. I love the abstractions an artist can achieve with playform) to generate a new set of images. So a few results (with some further tweaks by me in Photoshop) and a few of the generated images from midjourney and lensa that went into the soup."
Student Seun Elemo: An AI generated image of a "Black man," a statement on how Seun's unique self is seen as a "flat" generic identity by others
Student Benjamin Liang: He passed this poem that he wrote to GPT and asked it to render an image of how I felt in the moment he was writing it (i.e. a snapshot of him “self”).
