32 HOUSES
32 houses is an inquiry into artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the fuzzy, nostalgic, ultimately false aura that a childhood in suburbia evokes. What happens when an AI is supplied with photographs of such homes from my own neighborhood and asked to synthesize them? Will it discover an idealized form, or is it impossible to resolve; the image of house/home as slippery as its concept? I initially trained a web-based AI using photographs I took in my childhood suburban neighborhoods. The resulting images were familiar and yet profoundly strange, often missing fundamental features like doors or windows. This seemed reflective of my own memory of these homes, which is hazy and imprecise.
I was interested in the process of emergence as the AI slowly built an invented home, and I pulled a number of stills from a single evolution thread to create a sequence. In turn, those stills, ranging from an undifferentiated wall of pixels to something recognizable as a house, were further translated by my hand into small cross-stitched pieces.
Through repeated acts of translation between myself and the AI, between digital generation and analog labor in the form of hand stitched work, I am generating a feedback loop that both loses and gains information along the way. The glitchiness of my own memory is reflected back at me as I make and remake my childhood home.
To see a video of a house emerging over 140 iterations, click HERE
I was interested in the process of emergence as the AI slowly built an invented home, and I pulled a number of stills from a single evolution thread to create a sequence. In turn, those stills, ranging from an undifferentiated wall of pixels to something recognizable as a house, were further translated by my hand into small cross-stitched pieces.
Through repeated acts of translation between myself and the AI, between digital generation and analog labor in the form of hand stitched work, I am generating a feedback loop that both loses and gains information along the way. The glitchiness of my own memory is reflected back at me as I make and remake my childhood home.
To see a video of a house emerging over 140 iterations, click HERE
