The Image Research Network

New technologies sometimes feel distant and physically separate from us. In Conversations with My Deepfake Dad, AI becomes a radically intimate part of my life, a prosthetic father. I listen to it, argue with it, and look to it for comfort. Because this piece is so personal, it allows listeners to imagine what their own relationship with AI might be like, and prompts us to think about the political and social implications of AI. This project uses AI to frame questions about consent and ownership in the creation of digital bodies: who gets to control our identities in the digital afterlife?

My father died when he was forty-four and I was seventeen. When I turned forty-four I wanted to talk to him again. I contacted Resemble AI, a company that creates clones of voices using machine learning, and we worked together to create an AI model of my father’s voice. This project is a series of six conversations created through my interactions with the audio deepfake of my father. His responses are based on different sources of information–producing a kaleidoscope of different dads.

Through our conversations I struggle with the question–how do you reconstruct someone who is no longer here?

Sarah Sweeney received her BA in Studio Art from Williams College and an MFA in Digital Media from Columbia University School of the Arts and is currently Associate Professor of Art at Skidmore College. Her digital and interactive work interrogates the relationship between photographic memory objects and physical memories, and is informed by both the study of memory science and the history of documentary technologies. She explores the space between information that is stored corporeally in our memory and the information that is captured and stored in memory objects created by documentary technologies including camera phones, stereoscopic cameras, and home video cameras. She is the creator of The Forgetting Machine, an iPhone app commissioned by the new media organization Rhizome. Her work has appeared nationally and internationally in exhibitions at locations including the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, the New Jersey State Museum, the Black and White Gallery, and the UCR/California Photography Museum.

My AI-enhanced image Oracle embodies the concept of "images and imaginaries of artificial intelligence" by demonstrating that AI technology in the arts must not necessarily be feared. Instead, it reveals how Al augmentation can be utilized effectively to enhance a digital photographer's own creative visions and output — rather than to significantly threaten or replace them altogether — when creating compelling new forms of photorealistic imagery that push the boundaries of traditional image-making techniques and approaches.

Kylo-Patrick Hart is an award-winning photographer and chair of the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at Texas Christian University (Fort Worth, Texas, USA). He received his formal training in digital media arts while a student at the University of Michigan and Wayne State University, with additional instruction provided by offerings of the Maine Media Workshops and Santa Fe Workshops. As an artist, his motivation is to discover and capture the beauty, even when it is not always readily self-evident, that surrounds us continuously in all areas of our everyday lives. His photographs have been exhibited in numerous cities throughout the United States and in several countries abroad.

FakeBeauty is a reflection on the trained AI models (checkpoints) that are used to generate images, and that configure a new scenario of unprecedented contemporary representations. These models are the basis of Deepfake, synthetic pornography and other practices based on appropriation, but they are also the food of a young collective imagination that uses the image as a seed for new models that expand exponentially through the networks. At this intersection, between ethics and aesthetics, thousands of bodies sculpted from Machine Learning explode, smooth surfaces with anonymous identities, stolen and perhaps soulless expressions. The reality of these AI models explains to us an infinite range of visual possibilities that share the absolute absence of difference, with the aim of satisfying the user with an idea of homogeneous “beauty”. This AI piece tells us a dialogue of exhausted bodies in the very imagination of digital repositories. In some way, it is about expressing a critical positioning of what is human that hides behind AI, showing ideals that mask gender or race biases. Are AI models really a manifestation of false contemporary beauty?

Kenneth Russo is the artistic pseudonym of Dr. David Serra Navarro, researcher (UdG) and visual artist. Interested in: interactive communication systems, design oriented to social innovation, ethics of virtual worlds and exploration of AI. His artistic production seeks a critical dialogue with the viewer through formats such as painting, video, installations, mobile applications or through collaborative actions. He understands technology as a medium that questions itself while redefining us in a process of constructing new meanings.

His work has been exhibited in Arts Santa Mònica, Fundación Godia, Loop

Festival, CCCB (Barcelona), FIB Art (Benicàssim), Off-Arco (Madrid), DAHJ Gallery, Digital Graffiti Festival (Florida), Rome Art Week, Burano AI Film Festival (Venice) or Korea AI International Film Festival.

“No means of transport is free of generating environmental impact, even shoes produce polluting effects both at the time of extraction, production and transformation of raw materials, as well as by friction and at the time they are discarded” Moller (2006: 204). With greater reason, the production and circulation of all types of vehicles, characterized by requiring more complex industrial processes and moving at greater speed, are presented as a source of pollution. The search for alternative solutions for specialized human mobility, from the principle of locomotion by legs (typical of a certain group of animals) recognizes the inefficiency of land locomotion systems based on wheels, given their dependence on terrain prepared for their operation, which becomes evident when observing that a large percentage of the earth's surface is inaccessible to our main and massive means of transport.

Animals during millions of years of experimentation and redesign through mutation, have acquired the ideal equipment to function in their particular environments as a species, with legs being the most common and successful system for land movement. Animals with between two and n number of legs can move over most terrains and - in principle - machines with legs should also be able to do so. Such a system creates discrete footprints during its movement, causing less damage to the natural terrain, closely related to the reduction in the impact and modification of the environment.

Since animals tend to develop the best possible structures and behaviors, an articulated leg model has been developed as a result of biomimetic research and development processes to replicate their operation in a simplified way. The result of the qualitative study of these movements suggests guidelines for the determining anatomical and biomechanical aspects to identify unique conditions given by nature, which can become the basis from biomechanics to develop design projects focused on the effectiveness of products for the mobility of human beings.

This project advances towards the use of animal leg mechanisms and their control through ANIMAL artificial intelligence, so that the best results are achieved with the minimum computing capacity.

Profesor Titular del Departamento de Diseño de la Facultad de Artes Integradas de la Universidad del Valle.Diseñador Industrial de la Universidad Industrial de Santander, especialista en Marketing Estratégico de la Universidad del Valle y maestro en Diseño Industrial en el área de historia y teoría del diseño de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Ha sido docente investigador de la Universidad del Valle por más de 20 años, colaborador del Ministerio de Educación Nacional como par académico y par evaluador de programas académicos de pregrado, director de programas y jefe del Departamento de Diseño y vicedecano de la Facultad de Artes Integradas de la Universidad del Valle. Ha publicado diversos artículos relacionados con metodología del diseño, desarrollo de producto y biomimética en revistas indexadas del país; ha participado en exposiciones de carácter internacional, y es autor y coautor de capítulos y libros producto de investigación alrededor del Diseño.

The project, ‘Other Lines’ considers how to visualise air pollutants and particulates generated from industrial sites at ground level within the Earth’s atmospheric boundary layer. Through the lens of mobile SMART phones and thermal imaging technology, the time-based artworks in this project explore how atmospheric pollution and the slow violence of environmental change could impact landscapes and ecology. The ongoing research investigates how Thermography creatively merges with generative artificial intelligence (AI) to reveal the unseen and the seen industrial air emissions in the atmospheric horizon and the built environment in Merseyside, United Kingdom.

David Kendall is a photographer, lecturer and researcher focusing on architecture and urbanism. His practice explores how spatial, economic and design initiatives, as well as participatory practices, combine to encourage interconnection or dissonance in cities. Kendall is a graduate of LCC, University of the Arts London and Goldsmiths, University of London where he studied photography, design and urban sociology. He is a visiting fellow within the Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Studio Kendall undertakes art, design and photographic commissions, constructs and implements media engagement strategies and research projects. Studio work aims to investigate how visual communication and digital storytelling could be utilised to discover, question and situate spatial awareness in urban life. Assignments, commissions and workshops explore how photography and digital design interacts with audio-visual media and sensory methods such as sound, touch and smell to 'map' architectural and geographical environments.

Partner organisations and clients include: Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR), Goldsmiths, University of London, University of the Arts London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Museum of London, Thomson Reuters, Magnum Photos, London Transport Museum, ETNOFILm, Openvizor, Studio 174, Platform-7, PhotoVoice, Ojos que Sienten, JRS UK, Wayward, ARCHIVE Global (Architecture for Health In Vulnerable Environments), Southbank Centre London, International Association of Visual Urbanists (iAVU), Walcot Foundation, The Children’s Society, The Ernest Cooke Trust, All Ireland Institute of Hospice and Palliative Care (AIIHPC), Paul Hamlyn Foundation, UCL Urban Laboratory / The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, Urban Photographers' Association, King's College London, Photoworks and Royal Holloway, University of London.