WRITING EXAMPLES
Transcript
November 2024
Hello everyone, my name is Annabelle McEwen and today I'll be discussing my art practice under the theme of The Body as Data: using photography, printmaking, digital technologies and material output to explore how algorithmic surveillance and the categorisation of the body impacts users autonomy, identity and reality.
I would first like to acknowledge that my practice and the land we are on today belongs to the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, sovereignty was never ceded.
I was excited to see that my talk was taking place in this session which is titled Hybrid Materialities: Analog and Digital Interactions, as the hybridisation of the words digital and analog nicely encapsulates my practice. Here I have the etymology of each word visually identified, challenging the contemporary connotations.These links are reminiscent of the way in which knowledge is transferred and transformed. It is this epistemological chain which is under threat from the black box of large language models or otherwise known as AI. Contemporary connotations may suggest that digital insinuates something unembodied, unreal, immaterial, whereas analog on the contrary may suggest something embodied, real, material. However, paradoxically when we look back to the origin of both words we find that digital has its origins in the body, whereas analog has its roots in the proportionate copy. It is this intersection of the body as data, the digital, and the copy, the analog material, where my practice conjugates.
So my practice uses abstraction and mediation of imagery and data of the body as means of investigation. I often use self-portraiture to probe technology's impact on my own autonomy and body. In A Hacker Manifesto Mckenzie Wark suggests that “abstraction relies on the material world's most curious quality—information... it is at once material and immaterial. It discovers the immaterial virtuality of material, its qualities of information.”
Contemporary life is mediated by images, creating a maelstrom of copied, reproduced, and shared visual information. In the words of Guy Debord, “social relation among people is mediated by images.” This is now compounded by a second layer of mediation where images are increasingly altered, filtered, or even entirely generated. These distorted images are seizing the whirlpool of image culture.
My work, Clever Hans Learns 4 + 2 equals 6, I explore how images filter perception and the truths they may or may not inherit. Clever Hans, the so-called smartest horse in the world, appeared to solve maths and spelling problems, but it was actually just an illusion, where in reality he was responding to his trainer's subtle cues.
Kate Crawford in The Atlas of AI finds Hans' story compelling for its insight into the “relationship between desire, illusion, the business of spectacles, how we anthropomorphise the non-human, how biases emerge, and the the politics of intelligence”. I depict Hans on a translucent gallery window, symbolising how perception filters knowledge, potentially creating illusions. The screen printed image flips depending on the viewing angle and in the spectacle of the gallery, underscoring the complex interplays of knowledge, truth, and bias.
Another way I examined the cycle of mediation in this work is through how I distilled the information of the image. Repeatedly filtering the photograph through image-sharing social media editing software, I fabricated a compression artifact, abstracting the analog photograph through a computer optic methodology. Like an accelerated case study of Hito Steyerl‘s “poor image”, the pixel makeup of the JPEG has been corrupted through purposeful degeneration to a state of abstraction.
Another facet of my practice is interrogating how the body is extracted via corporate surveillance. Our actions attract, converted to data, and analysed by corporations, shaping us without transparent consent. In The Extreme Self, Baser, Copeland, and Obrist emphasise how “there's no escaping your face”, highlighting how facial identity, biases, and biometric data are extracted and exploited in today's digital world.
In 2019, Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen created ImageNet Roulette. This artwork trained an AI algorithm with selected training data from the real ImageNet data sets. The work exposed human biases and errors embedded in the classification process, and in doing so, connected AI to a fraught history of photographic identification.
I enacted a similar digital investigation by uploading my own biometric data to facial recognition service PimEyes. The Australian Federal Police have been found using this database. Met with controversy in 2023, Green Senator David Shoebridge suggested that the website is “a particularly dangerous facial recognition tool … [which] has been repeatedly criticised for enabling unlawful surveillance and stalking”, as reported by The Guardian. As someone with a female body, I am particularly terrified by this technology and its close relative, the deepfake. When I performed this experiment, the results presented some photos of myself lurking in the archives of the internet, some expected doppelgangers, but most frighteningly was a series of pixelated images with links to explicit content. I was hesitant to discover what waited for me at the other end of these hyperlinks. The potential for revenge pornography or deepfakes hijacking my biometric data and likeness is a real threat. In this instance, with this particular facial recognition database, I didn't find any exploitative imagery of my own body.
This work, PimEyes Webcam Doppelganger 2, depicts a distorted indeterminable depiction of some of my findings. Printing into plaster transposes the visual data into a physicality, paralleling the real world impact hijacked images of individuals can have.
Digital surveillance creates a feedback loop for users. In Hypernormalization, Adam Curtis uses the phrase, “if you liked that, you'll love this” to describe the cycle of targeted advertising. With the collection of individualised data, algorithms curate personalised content.
As our autonomy is skewed, content we consume is puppeteered by commercially driven algorithms and our bodies are targeted. An internal study by Meta found that Instagram actively harms users. In an ouroboros-like cycle, the content targeted to users on social media platforms can modify the body while distorting our perceptions of our own bodies.
One targeted advertisement I was fed frequently was for an app called MeThreeSixty, a commercial 3D body visualiser. This app encapsulates how bodies are extracted and reshaped through contemporary surveillance. By scanning users via phone cameras, it creates virtual abstractions of their bodies, aiming to inspire physical change through future me projections and a subscription fee.
My work, MeThreeSixty, is a warped self-portrait using this application as visual mediation. I experimented with the app and screen-recorded my experience. Taking a screenshot from the performance, I stretched the image, distorting the shape into an undulating slither. The physical shape of the materialised print on the industrial aluminium mimics the contours of the digital image, actualising the digital impact into a physicality, suggesting the corporeal effect of this technology. The reflective surface and scale of the work echoes that of a mirror.
Lately, I've explored other contemporary surveillance technologies as tools for representing the body. Using computer optics as a methodology and studio experimentation, I aim to reveal hidden power structures.
Legacy Russell's Glitch Feminism is an empowering and energising manifesto, motivating me in this mode of digitally mediated self-portraiture. To quote Russell, “the glitched self is always on the move. This diasporic journey of online to offline is a mode of parthenogenesis, reproducing oneself without fertilisation—splitting, merging, emerging. This is the rubric for an embodied political technology that queers proudly, creating space for new bodies and cosmic selves.”
In a feminist revision of Ovid's metamorphoses, we can unpack Echo's supporting role of that of the self-infatuated male. Echo is only able to repeat the words of others. The overlooked power of repetition Echo possesses is today reverberated in the existential threat of large language models, or AI, as they digest, metabolise, and excrete information.
Yet many of us are too infatuated with the identities we reflect, like Narcissus, online, to notice the epistemological threat and power of this repeated information.
In the words of Shannon Vallor, “AI systems mirror our own intelligence back to us… A selective amnesia that loosens our grip on our own human agency and clouds our self knowledge… [AI,] is an illusion that can ensnare even the most technologically adept among us… [we are] talking to [our] own reflection.”
My work, Echo: Autofabrication employs technological mediation of the body as means to ponder how contemporary surveillance presents a reflection of ourselves and collective data accumulation. This work uses a 3D scan of myself, which I then digitally repeated and warped like a reflection in water. I then took a screenshot of the hybridised 3D model and converted it into a flat relief model.
I enacted legacy Russell's “splitting, merging [and] emerging” by cutting the model in half before materialising it as a 3D print. The repetition, asymmetry, and hybrid nature of the work echoes the many identities the self inhabits, the way we reflect performed selves, the multitudes of data our bodies contain, and how it can all be extracted from us.
I continued to probe the material output of the 3D print by pushing it into an analog mode of image generation. Here you can see an animation which I made as part of my work Hymn to the [extreme] Self. I took the virtual model I made for the last work and then created a simple revolving animation. I then interrupted the makeup of the animation by extracting frames, simplifying them to visual data, and then converting them to topographic slides where different densities of tone in the image have increased opacity, intervening with the penetration of light. After printing, I re-photographed each frame and stitched it back together to create a 3D animation.
In this work, Hymn to the [extreme] Self, layers of different mediated imagery to visualise contemporary capitalist surveillance and its subjective impact. The relief sculpture blends a flat image with physical depth. The apertures in the aluminium reveal screen fragments where the image both connects, echoes, and ruptures. The piece explores the virtual versus the real, challenging the artifice of the image and data. It questions how corporate surveillance shapes our agency and self-perception.
In the title, Hymn is a reference to a sung praise.
Post-death of God in a Nietzschean sense, the self has become proliferated and worshipped. Self-worship, self-healing, self-shaping, auto-fabrication. This is amplified by the growth of parasocial relationships, influencers and K-pop stars reigning as deities and goddesses.
The metaphor is expanded by the liturgical nature of the text and ominous robotic female voice narrating in the work. If the performed self is the new God, then the technology that holds and proliferates, it is the Bible and the church. And like transubstantiation, the artifice of the virtual self becomes corporeal body and blood.
A third work in this series, Cartographic Collapse: Cross Section, is another iteration of this portrait. A map is a reality abstracted and defined by those in power. My body is abstracted and defined by means of data.This work is a depiction of the same 3D model present in the other two works.
Although not literally a map, the internal structures of the 3D print informed by my photogrammetry self-portrait emulates the language of drawn maps and references the power claimed through reality-defining cartography. I etch the image into aluminium, emphasising the industrialisation of the body and playing with the poetic potentials of reflection.
Just as maps are drawn by those with power, is the body defined, commodified and extracted through digital behavioural and optical surveillance by those in power. I have started to explore and discover other ways I can use my biometric data to construct material and visual output, an example seen here in the frame surrounding the cartographic collapse image. As technology is insidiously burrowing into the fabric of social existence and culture, I attempt to reveal the artifice, like unveiling the copy in the Fable of Borgia's Map.
Enacting glitch as a feminist act, slipping from the ouroboros cycle of digital surveillance and mediation. My body is extracted, it is data. My practice document mediates and then reflects the performance of extraction back to the viewer as means of interrogation. Thank you.
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