Artist Statement
My work explores the evolving relationship between humanity and technology. As a creative technologist, I use my art to unravel what it means to be human in an increasingly digitized world. I am fascinated by the dynamic interplay between organic creativity and non-human systems - especially as artificial intelligence and emerging technologies continue to evolve.
Central to my work is the exploration of personhood and how it is reshaped by technology. I often gravitate toward themes like personification, uncanny imagery, and speculative realities - spaces where human traits bleed into machines, and vice versa.
The Series
This portrait series was generated through a GAN trained on photographs of people I know. Each image presents a human face that is simultaneously familiar and alien. The portraits invoke pareidolia - each piece feels like a distorted memory, a ghost of a person both present and absent.
My process is highly experimental and fluid. I often begin a piece without a predetermined outcome, allowing intuition and technology to shape the final result.
Training the Family
Each portrait came from its own model, trained on a small personal dataset of one family member: me, my mom, my dad, my partner, and one trained on photos of us together. I ran the experiments in Colab notebooks and on my own PC, trying GAN and VAE architectures, saving output batches at 30 and 100 epochs, and in one stubborn case pushing a model of my own face to 669 epochs to see what it would become.
The archive of this project is honest about the process: hundreds of generations for every image chosen for the wall, a folder literally named embarrassing_images for the failures, and later Dreambooth sessions as the tools evolved. Machine learning art is mostly curation; the machine proposes and the artist survives the proposals.
In the Gallery
The series showed as six 20 by 20 inch prints in the Parallel Worlds exhibition at Allegheny College in December 2023.
TOYDY
For the Allegheny College student art show in 2023, I took a single image from this series - PARTNER - and showed it alone as TOYDY. I wanted to experiment with the experience of one face on its own, outside the family. It won first place for digital and photographic media that year.
