The pieces in this series utilize elements generated from artificial intelligence. The portraits are imagined by a generative adversarial network trained on creating convincing images of people that don't exist (thispersondoesnotexist.com). The text is created using InferKit. Brief explanation taken from their website (app.inkerkit.com/demo): "InferKit's text generation tool takes text you provide and generates what it thinks comes next, using a state-of-the-art neural network. It's configurable and can produce any length of text on practically any topic." In the case of these pieces, I prompt it with "This is my life story."
With the portrait and the "life story", I am able to produce representations of convincingly fake people and their fake life stories. Viewers feel empathy for the fake people shown and my intent is to encourage viewers to feel similar empathy for real people that are actually experiencing similar stories.
As two people grow in a relationship, the physical appearance of each other becomes less important while the details of their lives become more and more influential in defining how they see each other. I achieve a similar effect with these pieces. From afar, the focus of the piece is on the portrait while the text (life story) isn't so clear. However, as one physically moves closer to the piece to read the text (just as one grows closer to another in a relationship), the focus slowly shifts from the portrait to their life story. Some of the text is left subtle so as to encourage a higher level of intimacy with the piece to reveal the story.
I purposely leave the ending of the story in the same place the AI generation ended even if it is in the middle of a sentence. This encourages the viewer to continue the story and in a sense, reminds them it isn't real because it is at least partially left up to their imagination.
