Thank you for viewing my work in progress, I Take My Miracles Where I Find Them. In this work I use artificial intelligence to bring my original portraits to life with voices and movements that are not their own. My ongoing thoughts behind this work as well as sample pieces are included below.
In this project I create simulacra to engage the viewer in parallel experiences of unease: the viewer viscerally endures the uncanny valley while simultaneously being asked to ponder societally challenging and borderline-taboo topics. Unlike much of the AI work which is generative, this project differs because I use my own imagery as source content, meaning these are all people I have met and personally photographed. The duality of the viewing experience lies in both knowing that the video is a real human being and is also a faux construction of pseudo-reality.
This dissonance and distance created by AI enables viewers to momentarily disengage from their tightly-held beliefs and identities. Viewers are asked to ponder topics such as grind culture, body autonomy, patriarchy, race, gender and wealth structure. While one of the below samples asks an “easy” question, the final works will include purposefully unsettling and confrontational issues. Because the questions are posed by likenesses that are simultaneously real humans and also unreal constructions, the viewer is able to engage in topics that would otherwise trigger defensiveness and confrontation were they to be posed by an in-person experience, say, over the dinner table. At its core, this experience engages viewers with questions of what is and/or should be “real” and then enables viewers to extrapolate these same questions outward to a meta overarching level to examine those social structures that we take for granted as “real” or “givens'' in our society today.
