Shadows of You took my impression without ever touching me

series of 11” by 14” chromogenic prints

2022

This piece began with the slow and intimate process of molding the faces of friends. After casting them in plaster, I used vacuum-forming, an industrial manufacturing technique, to imprint them in sheets of clear plastic. The faces cracked and broke under the heat and pressure, and I reassembled these shards to make new faces and fields. I think of this as a material analogue to what happens to images of our faces that are stored within databases, where they are copied and recombined to train artificial intelligence algorithms. I overlaid these plastic impressions of friend’s faces with the impression of a human generated by StyleGAN2, a machine learning algorithm. In a 15 minute shadow play, You took my impression without ever touching me, performers used lights to project the faces onto a 30 foot curtain. As the lights animated the faces, we heard a conversation between a person and their clone exploring bot, puppet and shadow accounts- three kinds of online accounts that act as impressions of people, which have been known to use both real and generated faces as cover.

 I reperformed choreography from the performance in the dark room in order to print the faces from the installation as photograms. In these Shadows, the faces are returned to their original form of capture: the photograph. Yet these images, instead of indexing a face for an institution, record the passage of light through a plastic skin, emphasizing the hollow surface and cracked edges of the casts. Reminiscent of death masks, the photograms toy with the possibility that our images will outlive us as small pieces of algorithmic infrastructure.

 Thank you to alexis, Arlene, Cat, Emily, Hazel, Heige, Jun!, kelechi, Lorena, Mar, Matthew, Taylor, Maria Antonia, Sabrina & Wren for allowing me to cast your face for this piece.