Transforming a chronic disease into a durational performance: 114 Hemiplegic Migraines documents each attack in 2024 with a photo illustration.
114 Hemiplegic Migraines
AI Acne
MATERIAL
AI Acne is a set of 22 8.5 x 11 inch watercolor paintings on hydrophobic graph paper. The paintings have transparent overlays printed with green ink. Each green circle in the overlays corresponds to a widely used facial recognition algorithm’s 12% confidence that there is a whole face present at the location. Despite humans easily recognizing faces in these paintings 12% was the highest confidence reported by the algorithm.
CONCEPTUAL
More often than not when I’m interacting with friends, co-workers, family, content creators, or politicians its thru screens. This is a simple reality of the late 2010’s, of my geographical and social position, of my race and gender and class and age. What am I seeing when a face is reduced to mathematical representation on a screen? What is the facial detection algorithm seeing? How is representation different for humans and computers?
EXHIBITIONS
The piece was first exhibited at SYSTEM FAILURE at Minnesota Street Projects in San Francisco in 2019, then again at Beyond Embodiment at at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale, CA in 2020.
Masking Machine
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.
Pastel People
Pastel People is a series of collages/drawings made with the Pastel Girls paper doll app. The app is intended for making kawaii characters and dressing them up in fun, silly, combinatorial outfits. Resisting the arrow of expectation set by the app creators BlinkPopShift discovered ways to use the interface to make portraits exploring gender, menstruation, sexual violence, and unwanted body commentary, as well as figures obscured by abstract accumulation.
MASKING MACHINE (PHOTOGRAPHY SERIES)
The Masking Machine is a still color digital photography series using machine learning to create masks of the artists face. Each image begins life as a simple selfie, the most quotidian, maligned, and rampant photography of our time. Next the images are feed into a landmark detection algorithm which finds the position of my facial features. Using this data the artist applied a layer of digital makeup, contact lenses, or glasses. Once saved the images are fed back into the landmark detection algorithm and the process begins again, over and over, building up eerie distorted masks of the artists face.
Whether working in a dark room, coaxing chemical systems like wet plate collodion or cyanotype, or working with a black box, bartering with the algorithms like landmark detection or style transfer, what is photography if not scientifically processed image-making through a machine? And when done recursively, feeding the same image through that process again and again the machine itself also becomes visible in the images. Like repeatedly taking a pinhole photo of a pinhole photo until nothing remains but the artifacts of the photographic process itself made visible. Our time is caked with filtered images, enlarged eyes, and whitened teeth, all enabled by nearly invisible photographic algorithms. If we are to live with them we also need to recognize and understand them and Masking Machine is here to make them seen.
Update: Masking Machine was printed and debuted at the 2020 show Recoding CripTech at SOMArts.
Tape Faces
M’s interest in figures started with their December 2017 artist residency at This Will Take Time. These extensions of that AR work bubbled up when the artist was given a large collection of washi tape by a friend.
This Will Take Time Artist Residency
During their time at This Will Take Time they focused on drawing with an augmented reality headset. AR is an extremely ephemeral material as the drawings themselves could not be saved so only image and video documentation of the drawings survive.
The drawings include room scale abstractions, 3d figure drawings in situ within the furniture of the residency house, and performances in which the artist interacts with the finished pieces. They explore not only the drawings relationships with their surrounding but also how the artist’s body shares that space with them.
In Climb into Bed a gender ambiguous figure is arranged in a pose reminiscent from 19th century female nude paintings, but they aren't the only nude in the video. The artist climbs into bed with the figure drawing, attempting to touch their immaterial form, conjuring up ideas about consent, avatars, and touch across the digital divide.
Due to the limitations of the AR headset the artist also created a set of 5 speculative drawing performances for video to explore what could be possible with better hardware and software.
Speculative AR Drawings in 5 figures
Bodies of Meat and Light
“I’ve not seen a piece like this before. Mesmerising.” -Viewer
Room Scale Abstraction
Keepers
This pair of small drawings, each only 21 by 14 cm, is a touch screen finger painting made using Keep, a list and reminder app from Google. Transgender faces kept like secret charms between my grocery lists and unemployment reminders.
Cubist Selfies
Cubist Selfies are a photography series made on a smart phone. Each image contains 3 views of the artist face from the same day combining multiple spatial viewpoints in order to seam together a fragmented experience of self.
Performing with Machines
In 2016 BlinkPop began experimenting with collaging machine learning outputs to create performance masks. They used style transfer to mix images of their own face with the data converted styles of various artists and played with both using the masks to augment performance (of spoken poetry) and intentionally interfering with the computers ability to apply the masks.
Rocks in my mouth
2014
Rock in my mouth is a series GIFs. Each is a selfie with an animated revolving polygon inside the artists open mouth. Their soft insides made hard like rock candy armor. The images are vulnerably aggressive and revealingly hidden.
Other etc.
As both a transgender and Autistic person M Eifler frequently experiences being “clocked” in social situations. These drawing explore and represent that ongoing othering.
Anatomy Drawings
This series of drawings and collages explore diagrammatic depictions of the body, prosthetics, and tumors/physical abnormalities.
Self Portrait in a Chair
Self Portrait in a Chair is a gif animation of a diffuse rotating cloud hovering above a line drawing of a chair. It was the culmination of a series of drawings featuring abstractions of bodies among various furniture.