Artist
Liam Power
https://liamfpower.com/
https://www.instagram.com/verylowfrequencies/
http://thismaskdoesnotexist.herokuapp.com/
Liam Power is a multidisciplinary artist and creative-coder based in Melbourne, Australia. He works a lot with video, sound and data.
“My work primarily questions and critiques the boundaries of systems and their function in society. These systems could be computing technologies, perceptual and cognitive relations, or corporate surveillance techniques.
Right now I'm working with augmenting photographic material within neural networks. I train an algorithm with a large dataset of images which can then begin to make inferences about their style and features. Holding the sum of these images in it's memory, the network can map these features to synthesize new content.”
He launched a web app called “This mask does not exist” in August 2020 that uses NVIDIA’s StyleGan2 Neural Network to generate images. Follow the link here to see: http://thismaskdoesnotexist.herokuapp.com/
It uses a mixture of the FFHQ dataset and 1000+ images of people wearing masks from Kaggle trained on a cloud GPU. Created after the Victorian Government instituted stage four lockdown and mandatory mask-wearing.
AI and machine learning are today mainly used in corporate and government applications. Advertisers use AI to figure out what you might buy next. Facebook and Google use AI to try and pre-empt and automate human behaviour towards the goals of their platforms. My use of these algorithms attempts to demystify and uncover the flaws in these approaches. I use these systems in a scientifically unsound way, seeing what will happen when the algorithm is fed with dirty data, or undertrained. This explores the biased nature of these algorithms, as they are only as objective as the data which is fed to them by their human creators.
