what do i see? - 2018

Through this project, I am using traditional film photography to capture images of human faces generated by an AI algorithm on the website "This Person Does Not Exist” (https://this-person-does-not-exist.com/en) . These portraits technically do not correspond to existing individuals, yet they look very realistic and can even remind us of people we have met in the past. By photographing these virtual entities, I am attempting to emphasise the ontological nature of photography and demonstrate the power of the captured instant as proof of existence. As Roland Barthes argues in "Camera Lucida," a photograph is not only a testimony of the past but also the virtuality of the future. My project seeks to explore this idea in the context of virtual entities, which have no physical existence until they are captured by the camera. By using film photography, I am bringing these virtual entities into the physical world and demonstrating their existence through the tangible object of the negative film, that is why I decided to keep the film sprockets in the final prints. Furthermore, my project aims to question the originality of the data used by the AI algorithm and the role of the artist in this process. While the data used to generate these virtual entities, I guess belongs to the public domain, I am not downloading the images but rather photographing what I see. This act of capturing a virtual entity through the lens of the camera raises questions about authorship, and intentionality in the realm of digital art, and also how genotypes are represented in these Ai generated images. By contrasting the virtual world with the physical and chemical effects of film photography, my project explores the trans-codification of binary data into the physical world. Through this exploration, I hope to make the audience question the reality they see and the consequences of the rapid development of new technology and artificial intelligence.