A Visualization of Human Being Through Machine Language
What
Imagine how the machine sees us as a human being and how it will be different from what we see ourselves. Experimenting on the visualization of human being and stereotypes of races and identities through the machine help us to proceed to the way machine makes art and create arbitrary judgment on the physical appearance of the human. From the aspect of machine recognizes us as the human, the scenario will be represented as the simplification of our complicated figures along with the ability to make the judgment that machine is coded. In another word, different from how human visualize data information provided by the machine, which is a transformation from simpleness to intricacy, machine, on the opposite way, uses lines, dots, and numbers to represent the shape of a human, which is the conversion from intricacy to simpleness. Therefore, Data Mirror is trying to get audiences to experience the way machine visualizes human being, the opposite of human visualizes data information.
Inspiration I
WHY
Casey Reas, the co-developer of Processing, experiments on using software to corroborate idea is “a machine that makes art”. After visiting his artwork in Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, I was attracted by his artwork that he gives command to simple textures such as lines, dots, and numbers to compose the scenes of garden and universe. He uses JavaScript to visualize how art is being produced throughout human mind changes. Inspired by Casey Reas, who is also my chosen faculty for the graduate program at UCLA, I would like to create a program that may capture human beings and convert the captured scenes into digital sketches composed by the binary code, lines, and dots. The sketch will change along with the human makes movement in front of the camera. I will also use the projector to project the sketches to the wall to scale it to the same size with the actual human being so that it conveys the sense of “Data Mirror”.
Inspiration II
Daniel Rozin's most recent work Wooden mirror project contains the same idea with the data mirror, which is reflecting the human figure with codded materials. “That will take some time,” he says. “When I see it, I remember all the creations that it’s not.”
Inspiration III
Byron Kim’s Synecdoche (1991-present) – Whitney Museum of American Art. The first is kind of a classic, Byron Kim’s Synecdoche (1991-present) included in the ’93 Whitney Biennial. It’s a grid of over 400 painted squares, each of which match someone’s skin tone. For me it’s a very dramatic piece and an elegant idea that explodes the false duality we’re often given: that art that deals with race can’t be conceptual or can’t be minimalist or can’t be engaged with other formal qualities
Inspiration IV
Charles Gaines FACES: Set #4, Stephan W. Walls, 1978 FACES: Set #4, Stephen W. Walls is a reductive triptych in which the artist has deconstructed the same photograph down to the formal elements of line and color. For Gaines, the process of reducing the composition presents the opportunity for the viewer to look at the work from multiple viewpoints. Gaines was the first African American to be accepted into the MFA program at Rochester Institute of Technology's School of Art and Design and is a longtime faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts
