Art Armor is a series of handmade, one-of-a-kind art garments made to measure from 100% reclaimed materials for fat, disabled, and trans community members. A caretaker model allows for art object stewardship without ownership or financial obligation.
Images depict Zach (they/them), a tall fat person with thin purple hair, wearing an abstract, hand painted, pink and colorful, quilt coat and makeup mirroring the petal patterns on the garment.
Synthetic Self creates a lifelike video call interface that responds to audience questions and statements through text or verbal inputs. Here are three examples:
Installation: A cozy chair is set up in front of a screen on which a person waits idly. When you sit down they perk up, explaining they are a synthetic copy of the artist M Eifler. There is something not quite right about the face and voice. Maybe you ask them why the artist wanted to copy themselves. In response they tell you a story about M's struggles with intermittent non-verbal episodes or flip through their database of drawings and show you a page from M’s journal.
Performance: On stage you see a person with a microphone and another projected on a large screen. Together they are giving a presentation on the lived experience of chronic illness. They joke and tell stories together and the virtual performer shows images related to the stories. Near the end of the performance the virtual performer comes out as an AI copy.
Virtual Performance: You join a zoom performance. When you arrive you see 2 video performers who look eerily similar. One is labeled M Eifler and the other Synthetic Self. Both performers speak to and interact with the audience, answering questions and speaking to each other. It's quickly apparent all the little ways the living performer and the synthetic one are different but later after the performance is long over they begin to bleed together in your memory.
Prosthetic Memory is an ongoing experiment in self-augmentation combining handmade journals, daily videos, and a custom AI. With the journal laying flat on a desk a camera captures its pages. The AI compares this feed to its model, determines which page is showing, and projects an associated video memory on the desk nearby. Created to replace the artist's long term memory which was damaged by a childhood brain injury, Prosthetic Memory explores questions like:
-When memories are external, mediated, and public what is the difference between how they are experienced by their creator and an audience?
-Do our assumptions, fears, and uses for AI change when data and machine learning models are created by individuals and families at personal, instead of corporate, scale?
-Given our increasing exposure to algorithmic interventions, how do our identities and perceptions shift when we see ourselves and others through that lens?
The first iteration of Prosthetic Memory, captured in the documentation provided, created a bridge between the physical and virtual components of the memory. In upcoming iterations an age-malleable recreation (deep fake) of the artist will appear on a screen above the notebook, reading from its pages, and, using NLP and sentiment analysis, pointing the user to other pages and videos with similar events or feelings.
Version 1.0 was first exhibited at the Recoding CripTech show at SOMA arts in 2020.
The project was awarded a STARTS Prize 2020 Honorary Mention.
While AI was a hot topic in the art and wider world as we slid into a new decade, it was often conceptualized as distant, strange and uncontrollable. Prosthetic Memory makes it extremely intimate. It is, to quote mathemusician Vi Hart "a chunk of myself I’ve externalized and personified as “other” in order to experiment with my perspective and my desires."
This project was first exhibited at the Recoding CripTech show at SOMA arts in 2020 and awarded a STARTS Prize 2020 Honorary Mention.
While AI was a hot topic in the art and wider world as we slid into a new decade, it was often conceptualized as distant, strange and uncontrollable. Prosthetic Memory makes it extremely intimate. It is, to quote mathemusician Vi Hart "a chunk of myself I’ve externalized and personified as “other” in order to experiment with my perspective and my desires."
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.
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.
In 2017 BlinkPop was invited to contribute to STATE CHANGE, the second Livingroom Light Exchange publication. This piece was a first of attempt at combining zine and video. It focused on the the relationship between body and bed by experimenting with conducting an intimate immersive experience at a distance.
Bed Art was originally conceived in 2017 as a series of pillows to surround the artist during their frequent neurological attacks. The project aimed to think of their bedroom as part art studio and part art gallery. This thread has also expanded into other work.
Constructed from 3D scans of SFMOMA, How to Bootleg is an experiment in overlapping virtual and physical spaces. It can be watched anywhere but it is highly encouraged to watch it in a mobile VR HMD either in the associated galleries or before or after a visit. The second video sis documentation of a viewing experience in context.
This series of drawings and collages explore diagrammatic depictions of the body, prosthetics, and tumors/physical abnormalities.
