In November of 2019 BlinkPop was invited to the Norfolk Artist Residency, hosted in a large barn in semi-rural Massachusetts. While there they focused on experimentation in a large scale installation using twine and paper party decorations. They built up large forms in a central installation, played with incorporating studio infrastructure, used the packaging from the decoration to create translucent volumetric drawings, and documented both the construction and the choreographed death of each of the pieces.
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.
Home:\Studio\M
This collage series was an experiment playing with paper file folders. This now rarely needed object is still the originator of the skeuomorph file folder in operating system interface design. This series plays with the relationship between storage and information, collapse-ability and productive mess. Each collage is titled in a file addressing style which includes information on physical location where it was made (building, room, and specific wall) as well as properties of the folder used (hex color code and associated color name). For example: Home:\Studio\M\NM327°\EB313B “Alizarin”
Street Spore
Spore was BlinkPopShift’s first street art piece. It was installed on July 28th 2019 in Clarion alley on a wooden power pole amidst the long tradition of mural work at the cite. The sculpture was wade from paper, glue, and a handful of zip-ties to grip the light weight body around the pole. The piece lasted about 2 months before it was turn down.
Making of:
Untitled, Hand woven blanket
This quilt, now in the Hart Collection, is constructed of 24 unique hand woven panels. Each panel was made on a small lap loom over the course of a year. The teal hand binding which joins the panels into the quilts top was inspired by Guatemalan garment techniques.
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.
Amnesia Diaries
Brain damage acquired in childhood has left M with minimal long-term memory. This project was their first attempt at building a prosthetic replacement. Using a combination of videos and writing addressed to their future self the artist spent May 2018 - August 2020 building up a dataset which would later be used in building Prosthetic Memory.
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.
