Masking Machine is a wearable AR apparatus and performance which brings audience, artist, and algorithm face to face. It was inspired by a photography series of the same name.
Masking Machine, documented here performed at the YBCA Bay Area Now 8 opening.
The Masking Machine is a still color digital photography series using machine learning to create masks of the artists face. Each image begins life as a simple selfie, the most quotidian, maligned, and rampant photography of our time. Next the images are feed into a landmark detection algorithm which finds the position of my facial features. Using this data the artist applied a layer of digital makeup, contact lenses, or glasses. Once saved the images are fed back into the landmark detection algorithm and the process begins again, over and over, building up eerie distorted masks of the artists face.
Whether working in a dark room, coaxing chemical systems like wet plate collodion or cyanotype, or working with a black box, bartering with the algorithms like landmark detection or style transfer, what is photography if not scientifically processed image-making through a machine? And when done recursively, feeding the same image through that process again and again the machine itself also becomes visible in the images. Like repeatedly taking a pinhole photo of a pinhole photo until nothing remains but the artifacts of the photographic process itself made visible. Our time is caked with filtered images, enlarged eyes, and whitened teeth, all enabled by nearly invisible photographic algorithms. If we are to live with them we also need to recognize and understand them and Masking Machine is here to make them seen.
Update: Masking Machine was printed and debuted at the 2020 show Recoding CripTech at SOMArts.
Making the Bed is a VR library of a diverse set of beds, from royal to homeless. Each bed can be explored and lied in at both miniature and life-size.
Below is the text of a 2017 research write up of the project for EleVR, a reseach and Development Team at SAP
Making the Bed is a VR space developed in Anyland. When it first loads you are plopped down on a red rug surrounded by a cloud of miniature beds. Each bed, in this frozen avalanche of doll furniture is numbered, 1 – 50, and some have a little green dot over the number. That dot is there to indicate which beds you can visit and experience at full size. As stated in the instructions it’s best experienced seated on the floor with a pillow near by so that you can lay down in the full sized versions. Touch a number with the model of your out stretched pointer finger, number 18 say, and you are teleported to a life sized cot in a jail cell. Touch the number again to return home. Touch number 24 and you are teleported to a nest of pillows on a fire escape. Touch the number again to return home.
This exploration was sparked by a recent Year of the Body related discussion we had in which Evelyn mentioned an art school course she took called the Drawing Marathon which helped her shift drawing from a mentally directed activity (one of planning and judging) to a physically directed activity (one of arms and fingers making decisions). The class asked her to draw for 100 hours: 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 2 weeks. The assignments changed frequently: Draw for 30 mins, now erase everything you drew. Fill larger and larger surfaces. Draw for 30 mins, now tear your drawing into tiny pieces and glue it onto another sheet. Draw the same thing, a piece of fruit for example, 50 times.
That last direction, drawing the same thing 50 times, is the one I used for Making the Bed. The process was pretty simple. The first bed was just a pillow, a platform, and four legs. The next one had drawers underneath, so fancy. Then came round beds and four posters and cribs and bunk beds and by 10 I had completely run out of bed ideas. The idea of beds expanded to places that we sleep, like homeless encampments and fire escapes and jail cells, and places other animals sleep too, like nests and burrows. One bed just referenced migraines, something that happens frequently in my bed. But then I was out of ideas again and I turned to historical research to keep me going. Turns out the first beds were just piles of wool and straw but it wasn’t until the invention of the platform off the ground that beds benefits (less bugs and rats) really kicked in.
Then I went off an a metaphors and fairytales tangent making beds for the stories of Princess and the Pea and Goldilocks and the Three Bears as well as the sayings “Sleeps with the fishes” and “Dirt nap”. And eventually, in the home stretch, I realized I could make the beds any size I wanted and started designing the beds to be interesting to lay down in at life size. The layout of the final space: the mini map, the teleportation, the detailed larger versions, and the secret teleportation objects, all came out of that late stage realization.
That late epiphany about scale (a topic VR seems always to loop around back too) reveals one of the clearest advantages of the medium.
I started this project standing but at some point over the 30-40 hours it took to complete I took to sitting on the floor legs crossed meditation style or stretched out in a Y. It saved energy while still making it easy to maneuver around the space by sliding on my butt. I found my arms could work for long hours in what I have taken to calling the ‘hug range’: that empty space between your arms when you pretend to hug a large beach ball. I would on occasion reach out beyond the hug range to grab or place something but keeping my shoulder blades down my back with my elbows close in to my ribs let me work for longer.
(Side note: I have noticed that I prefer not wearing over the ear headphones while doing this work because the social hum of the lab makes the headset feel less isolating. I’m sure Chaim and Robert and Dan, my neighbors at HARC, can attest to the fact that I look ridiculous at best sprawled on the floor next to them all day with a giant black mask strapped to my head, flailing at the air with two black donuts on sticks, all while wearing an adult onesie I made myself.)
But satisfying my need to work in the hug range (a delightfully human need) also means that, at least initially, every bed had to fit within that small physical range. I made less detailed overviews as sketches. Then I scaled up the sketches and worked on them at a new level of detail. The difference here is that the same motor schema, hold up wait a minute:
Motor schema are a idea I am getting from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s, 1999, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. (Hit up page 77 for a more through introduction) A motor schema is a set of movements by which I interact with a basic level category of object like a car. When the motor schema for the use of two objects varies beyond a certain threshold we put the objects in different categories: car and boat for example. But if their motor schema maintains a general similarity (steering wheel, analogue acceleration etc) we group them under an umbrella term: vehicle. Motor schema variation is one way the body creates knowledge, how it categorizes.
So again the difference here is that the same motor schema I used create the miniatures, was used to create detail on the life sized versions as well. My body is thus categorizing those two levels of zoom as the same (or at least similar) tools. You might be used to that kind of motor schema flexibility in say Maya where zoom lets us use similar finger motions to manipulate at different scales but those are symbolic, abstract interactions via the interface of the keyboard and mouse. It feels completely different to have motor schema flexibility for the distance my actual hand is moving through actual space.
Making the Bed is open to explore via Anyland just go to areas and search for “MAKING THE BED”
Big Important Emotion, a 2 sculpture pair, are a pair of brown paper sculptures. Evolving from 2017’s series Unscannables, 3D paper collage sculptures exploring the line between what is possible in physical objects and surfaces and what can be seen and represented virtually, the Big Important Emotion diptych erupted at a moment of high stress and vulnerability in the artists life. All color and pattern striped were away They were made of peeled paper board, with all color and pattern striped away, and took on all the raw sharp defense so prevalent in moments of upheaval. This piece is now in the High Sierra Hermitage Collection.
Brain damage acquired in childhood has left M with minimal long-term memory. This project was their first attempt at building a prosthetic replacement. Using a combination of videos and writing addressed to their future self the artist spent May 2018 - August 2020 building up a dataset which would later be used in building Prosthetic Memory.
Invisible Sculpture is a performance structure for audiences to interact with an invisible sculpture via an AR headset. One at a time during the performance audience members get a chance to see the invisible and their act of looking will reveal the size and position of the sculpture to those around them. Originally designed to enable the artist to show monumental scale sculpture as guerilla art at SFMOMA later the piece was shown at The Wattis, UC Irvine, and TED.
Ken Becker and the artist sat down to talk about the piece in December 2016.
This piece focuses on the how’s of using art based research to produce better user experiences and technology in general. To read the full piece visit medium.
During their time at This Will Take Time they focused on drawing with an augmented reality headset. AR is an extremely ephemeral material as the drawings themselves could not be saved so only image and video documentation of the drawings survive.
The drawings include room scale abstractions, 3d figure drawings in situ within the furniture of the residency house, and performances in which the artist interacts with the finished pieces. They explore not only the drawings relationships with their surrounding but also how the artist’s body shares that space with them.
In Climb into Bed a gender ambiguous figure is arranged in a pose reminiscent from 19th century female nude paintings, but they aren't the only nude in the video. The artist climbs into bed with the figure drawing, attempting to touch their immaterial form, conjuring up ideas about consent, avatars, and touch across the digital divide.
Due to the limitations of the AR headset the artist also created a set of 5 speculative drawing performances for video to explore what could be possible with better hardware and software.
“I’ve not seen a piece like this before. Mesmerising.” -Viewer
Room Scale Abstraction
