This work is an installation that uses artificial intelligence algorithms, which are also used to produce fake videos, to generate a large number of self-portraits that imitate the artist's childhood. In the "Input" section, home videos of the artist's childhood are played on a loop at very short intervals on five CRT televisions. The old video images, repeated intermittently with noise peculiar to magnetic tape, make us aware of the finite and irreversible nature of time. In the "Generation" section, the video material being played back in the "Input" section is trained by an artificial intelligence algorithm called the "adversarial generation network" to generate a self-portrait. The process of generation is projected on a screen made of steel grating, which at first is just noise, but as time goes by, it changes into something that looks like a face. In the "Output" section, the self-portrait generated after 400 training cycles in the "Generation" section is printed from a large inkjet printer.
A record of reality and a fake face produced from it. Here, the in-between process is presented continuously. The contrast between the endlessly repeated playback of home videos and the endlessly generated self-portraits emphasizes two different temporalities, the finite and the infinite. This structure of continuity or contrast places us between record and fiction, reality and fiction. The title "Ghost Painter" refers to the structure of painting a self-portrait without an author, while at the same time creating a ghostly image halfway between the real and the fake. In today's information environment, where "created reality" can have an advantage over actual reality, this work questions the ambiguity of the authenticity of things.
Excerpts from the introduction to solo exhibition "Ghost Painter" at Art House Oyabe, Toyama, Japan.
This text was translated with DeepL.com.
