We live in a world where algorithmic systems determine who is seen, heard, loved.

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I’ve made a great deal of self-portraiture work about self-reflection, identity, and recognition.

My traditional fine art training and portfolio has focused on portraiture, especially self-portraiture; on capturing human likeness; on efficiently depicting distinct faces.

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I’ve recently connected this to my struggle to generally understand(?) recognize(?) faces, especially when I am overstimulated.

I have particularly struggled to feel like I can recognize, understand, and love my own image. My apparent obsession with discerning, depicting, interrogating my self and what I look like is inextricable from my internal struggles to discern, depict, and interrogate who I am inside: my queerness; my Filipinoness; my neurodivergency.

So, I have spent a lot of time looking at mirrors. As a digital painter and computer scientist, I have also spent a lot of time looking at computers. Recently, I’ve started asking the computers to look back.

I’ve been calling this line of work RECURSIVE SELF PORTRAITS – a series about performing, presenting, and re-presenting, the self.

THE RECURSIVE SELF PORTRAITS

(so far…)

ARTIST IN THE LOOP

I look at my self in the mirror and I paint what I see. I ask an AI (Camera → Image to Text Description → Text to Image Generation) System to do the same. We perform this in a public space where the community is invited to reflect and compare the two (artists? portrait drawing machines? image generation systems?) at play.

ARTIST-IN-THE-LOOP has been performed twice (at The Jacobs Institute for Design, at tiat.place) and will also appear in the art gallery at the Creativity & Cognition conference in London, UK this July.

refractions of the self: exploring the digital self portrait

workshop @ tiat.place on digital self portraiture, conducted together with artist Isabel Li

recognizing my self

recording available here

puppet show, lecture, performance at ALL CHAT, curated by chia amisola, at tiat.place.

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i wish to do more digital puppetry

I’ve also used this same “recognition” system for subsequent lectures and performances. I’m very interested in this use of live tracking and labeling of my face and body; of performing with a labeled digital self; in “digital puppetry”!!

You can play with the puppet rig yourself (and upload your own puppets and costumes) here: https://shmuh.co/puppets/

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I’d be super interested in working with others on digital puppetry + theatre:

what can we do with a system trained to identify a cast of distinct faces — how can we play with the idea of being “labeled” with a “role”? How can we exploit the (social, technical) “glitches” that characterize these kinds of interactions?