Misidentified Series:
A Garden of Men
In collaboration with Alya AlQarni.
A Garden of Men is an AI generated artwork of a series named “Misidentified” that addresses the issue of cultural exclusiveness and biases of ML through a practical critique of culturally biased datasets. It raises the question of machine perception of different cultures as these datasets are, in analogy, the modern archeological record of material culture that we perceive —contemporary— societies through.
This question was sparked when a ML model, im2text, identified— or misidentified— a full covered woman with her son as: "A man sitting on a curb holding his phone". In this project, we are testing several images through im2txt to generate rather irrelevant captions to use them as gallery labels with the imagery artifacts. The selection of images is based on assigned factors: One, candid culturally relevant images. Two, mostly men to highlight the "Shimagh" element for its aesthetics.
The images are exhibited as a photo gallery with captions and translation into Arabic. It is designed to gradually reveal the layers of misidentification. The user experience starts with full view of familiar photos and images until he or she reads through the labels and its translation. Only then, the title of the exhibition/project and the witnessed results come into a full circle.
One image has stood out in the results and inspired even more experimentation with it. That is the "a bunch of vases that are sitting on a table."; which is in fact a group of Saudi men wearing their traditional red and white Shimagh in an stadium. We took the image through a minor session in DeepDream, taking the result and Style Transferring it with a mask of flowers we made in Photoshop; their synthesis was taken again through DeepDream but for multiple sessions to finally create the masterpiece of the image gallery: A Garden of Men.
The concept of the piece is to layer; to layer either to conceal or to expose. The process of making the piece consists of three main layers: the original image, the texture, and finally the model treatment. Conceptually, that layering could also be found in the composition of the seated men, how that manifests both dystopic and cynical impressions which created a pseudo-archival piece of the history of the “other”.
DATA FICTION, 2021. CAIRO, EGYPT.