Shadow Self
exhibition, Distillery Gallery, 2019
What does it mean to collaborate with your own digital shadow? Shadow Self is a project made together with creative technologist Andrew Sliwinski. It began as a question about collaboration — not just between human and technology, but between different versions of myself. We decided to build an artistic partner that “knew me” through the digital breadcrumbs I'd left behind. We built a custom GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) and fed it years of images from my likes on social media. Now the GAN, trained on my visual tastes, would become my artistic collaborator. The process of making work in collaboration with this tool was a kind of visual conversation: I would send the AI one of my artworks, like passing a note to a pen pal, and it would respond with an image that felt both foreign and familiar.
This back-and-forth became our rhythm, each artwork fed into the next. I would take the GAN's response and literally fold or weave it into my next piece, creating something that was neither purely mine nor purely the machine's, but something more blurry, born from our exchange. Was I collaborating with technology, or was I simply having an elaborate conversation with myself? The AI had learned my visual preferences from hundreds of my online “hearts”, becoming a mirror that reflected not just what I consciously chose to create, but what I unconsciously loved to look at and consume. The work you see here captures one complete cycle of this dialogue — a series of creative call-and-response that maps the strange territory between artist and tool, between intention and surprise, between self and shadow self.
This project was shown in Dear So And So, a group show focused on collabortaive artist projects. The exibition was curated by Helen Popinchalk and shown at the Distillery Gallery in Boston, MA.
+ Boston Hassle Review
This back-and-forth became our rhythm, each artwork fed into the next. I would take the GAN's response and literally fold or weave it into my next piece, creating something that was neither purely mine nor purely the machine's, but something more blurry, born from our exchange. Was I collaborating with technology, or was I simply having an elaborate conversation with myself? The AI had learned my visual preferences from hundreds of my online “hearts”, becoming a mirror that reflected not just what I consciously chose to create, but what I unconsciously loved to look at and consume. The work you see here captures one complete cycle of this dialogue — a series of creative call-and-response that maps the strange territory between artist and tool, between intention and surprise, between self and shadow self.
This project was shown in Dear So And So, a group show focused on collabortaive artist projects. The exibition was curated by Helen Popinchalk and shown at the Distillery Gallery in Boston, MA.
+ Boston Hassle Review
Artist input, collage on paper.
GAN output from artist’s image.
Animation of the GAN processing input.
Animation of part of the GAN training set, from the artist’s Tumblr likes.
Artist image, cut and folded paper collage, 11 x 14 in.
GAN image, Archival inkjet print, 11 x 14 in.
Exhibition view.
Exhibition view.
Installation detail.
Artist image, cut and folded paper collage, 11 x 14 in.
GAN image, Archival inkjet print, 11 x 14 in.