Archival inkjet prints, brass frames, hand drawn digital wallpaper

Original digital photographs by Thomas Dexter

Brief:

In Gram’s faces I sent personal family photographs of my now deceased grandmother (Gram) through a face detection program. The bright green squares indicate where the algorithm sees a face. In an act of both homage to Gram, and fascination with the system’s fixation on Gram’s wallpaper, I re-drew this wallpaper from memory and photographs, embellished now with the characteristic green square.

Backstory:

This work came about almost by accident, when I was training the AI for a previous artwork, how do you see me. I worked with photos I had at hand on my computer, which happened to be personal family pictures. I discovered these while cleaning up my hard drive and was taken aback by the intimacy and yet simultaneously the disquietude of the algorithmic gaze as it panned across the face of my deceased Grandmother and the interiors of her former home. In an act of both homage to Gram, and fascination with the system’s fixation on Gram’s wallpaper, I re-drew this wallpaper from memory and photographs, embellished now with the characteristic green square. In a time of collective mourning, that has also been a time of personal grief, I found some solace in this reflective work.

There is something funny, and beautiful, and sad in reviewing these old shots, taken by my ex-partner, remembering Gram, her household aesthetic, and all the little bits and pieces that get detected as faces. There is something of the whimsy of childhood and the naïveté reflected in the algorithm juxtaposed with a darkness of times lost and the handing of our intimate and precious lives to algorithms that mistake wallpaper for faces.