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Random International

Presence and Erasure
Presence and Erasure is a portrait machine that explores the reality of automated facial recognition and how people relate to their self-image, instinctively and emotionally. Within a given spatial domain, the artwork constantly scans for faces in the vicinity and photographs them. When the artwork’s algorithm detects a certain quality within a photograph, this image is temporarily printed at large scale by exposing a photochromic surface to light impulses. Each automated portrait remains for little more than a minute, before gradually dissolving into blankness. RANDOM INTERNATIONAL began to combine transient mark-making with automated portraiture early on in their practice, in 2008. Presence and Erasure marks the latest development in this body of work and assumes a minimal, industrial aesthetic that references their earliest studies on this theme. The physical impact of facial recognition and machine vision is emphasised by the exposure of the printing process itself, contrasted against the aesthetic of the high resolution portraits generated. RANDOM INTERNATIONAL intend this as a counter to the perception of surveillance footage as always being low quality, aiming to create a deeper reflection on the nature of surveillance today as well as the resounding cognitive and emotional dissonances.

Karen Lancel & Hermen Maat

Master Touch

In ‘Master Touch’ you make your face visible on a big screen by touching your face. By caressing your own face you ‘paint’ your face on a large electronic screen. On the screen your face appears and merges slowly with portraits of the Rijksmuseum collection.
Merge your face with master pieces from the Rijksmuseum collection, for example a portrait of Rembrandt or van Gogh. Together with the Old Masters you compose a new portrait here and now. In an a sensitive, playful and innovative way you open up the collection and make it personal.

AHN SUN MI

安宣美
mobius strip

The young Korean photographer, Ahn Sun Mi lets us discover her through self portraits. She opens up her poetic universe, a world between dream and reality, where nostalgic feelings cradled by childhood fairy tales and the pursuit of her own inaccessible and voluptuous femininity are the essence of her inspiration. Sun Mi envelops in her familiar world of childhood with her sweet self portraits where toys from the past come to reassure her in a friendly way. Soap bubbles, teddy bears, umbrellas and fluorescent wigs seem to travel with her to the Milky Way in her quest to become a mature woman.

robert mapplethorpe

רוברט מייפלתורפ
ロバート·メイプルソープ
РОБЕРТ МЭППЛТОРП
self portrait

Robert Mapplethorpe is very well know of making impressive portraits, and is skilled in the arts of the flower and black and white photography. I’ll be showing you a collection of his flower art. He especially likes orchids and calla lilies. He brings the best out of them, beautiful colors, contrast, composition and lighting. All that is taken into consideration to make something really impressive.

CINDY SHERMAN

سيندي شيرمان
辛迪·舍曼
סינדי שרמן
シンディ·シャーマン
신디 셔먼
СИНДИ ШЕРМАН
history portraits

Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting. To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and wardrobe mistress. With an arsenal of wigs, costumes, makeup, prosthetics, and props, Sherman has deftly altered her physique and surroundings to create a myriad of intriguing tableaus and characters, from screen siren to clown to aging socialite.
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Ahn Sun Mi

安宣美
The young Korean photographer, Ahn Sun Mi lets us discover her through self portraits. She opens up her poetic universe, a world between dream and reality, where nostalgic feelings cradled by childhood fairy tales and the pursuit of her own inaccessible and voluptuous femininity are the essence of her inspiration.

kalliope amorphous

Glass Houses: Self-Portraits In A Moving Mirror
“In this project, I confront questions of self-image and the ways in which our interior worlds conflict with our exterior form. How does the image that we present to the world differ from what we see when we look in the mirror? If our desires, fears, secrets and vulnerabilities were manifested physically, what might they look like?”

Jekaterina Nikitina

Lithuanian artist Jekaterina Nikitina has an awkward appeal that can easily be considered the trademark of her work. We recently discovered some of her self portraits. While some of her photos were of a relatively pedestrian fare, the majority of the photographs had a foot in quirky surrealism.

LOLA DUPRE

Лола Дюпре
ロラ·デュプレ
萝拉杜普雷
ولا دوبري

Lola, who defines herself as a collage artist and illustrator, caused a big buzz with her recent works that could be defined as kaleidoscope explosion portraits. One cannot but simply admire her remarkable technique and the meticulous working process that lies behind the dazzling optical illusions that she creates. Moreover, what we love about her works is that despite the ”explosive” treatment that Lola Dupré puts the original portraits through, the final result is equally, or even more, dynamic and complex.

JAN VERCRUYSSE

Les Paroles

According to Jan Vercruysse, art no longer has a place in this world. As a result, he seeks, through his work, a new place for art and new conditions in which to work. His earliest photographic works recreated historical subjects, such as self-portraits, still lifes and mythological scenes. Gradually, he evolved a sculptural vocabulary of narrow rooms, empty frames and bases without objects. The sacred spaces created by Vercruysse in these works are known as Chambres or Tombeaux and represent the artist’s last-ditched attempts to create art that refers only to itself. His later works, such as plaster pianos, blue Murano glass musical instruments and bronze and ceramic turtles, achieve a perfect equilibrium between conceptual conviction and aesthetic concerns, and also reflect a real pleasure of making.

Tim Noble and Sue Webster

spinning heads

Noble and Webster produce silhouetted self-portraits through carefully constructed mounds of rubbish and debris illuminated at one precise angle, transforming the abstract pieces into figurative composites. Each sculptural installation represents this duality of art and also references the duality of man. Things appear to be far more complex than what first meets the eye. Whether you first notice the figurative shadow or the abstract wood piles, there is always the other to view second as its other half.

NOVA JIANG

نوفا جيانغ
Ideogenetic Machine
“Ideogenetic Machine” is an interactive installation that incorporates portraits of participants into an algorithmically generated comic book. A camera captures the portrait live while an algorithm transforms the photographic image into a “line drawing”. Face detection is utilized to insert-code generated blank speech bubbles into the narrative. The software creates never repeating compositions using a set of rules that approximate the compositional decisions made by a human comic book author. The comic is projected live, and consists of the algorithmically processed portraits as well as randomly chosen story elements from a database of drawings. The story elements are drawn by the artist, mostly illustrating speculative narratives based on current news and events. A participant can email him or herself the finished comic as a PDF file.

FILE FESTIVAL

KIMIKO YOSHIDA

كيميكو يوشيدا
吉田公子
키미코 요시다
קימיקו יושידה
КИМИКО ЙОШИДА

A unique artist with sophisticated style, Yoshida’s Asian influenced self portraits are unprecedented. Her work evokes pertinent questions as to the role of women in modern Asia and is strongly driven by feelings of transformation and fleeting:
“ … when I was three, my mother threw me out of the house. I left clutching a box filled with all my treasures. I went to a public park. The police found me there the next day. Since then, I’ve always felt nomadic, errant, fleeing.”
“Art is above all the experience of transformation. Transformation is, it seems to me, the ultimate value of the work. Art for me has become a space of shifting metamorphosis. My Self-portraits … are only the place and the formula of the mutation.”

MAR CANET & CARLES GUTIERREZ

videomaton
File Festival

The initial idea was to engage audiences with the classical paintings. The installation tries to transform the classical portraits into memorable and playful experiences. In short, by looking into a mirror a face of participant is captured by the system. Next, the captured face travels into one of the classical portraits. Hence, the viewer is invited into the gallery in order to recognize him or herself in one of the paintings. In other words, the art piece replaces the original painted faces by the faces of the audience. To be more specific, the authors have created an original face-morphing that integrates itself into the well-know portraits, like Meninas by Goya. To put in a nutshell, the common experience of modern art is replaced by a novel, playful and enjoyable encounter. The installation creates a framework of expression where audience spontaneously and freely interact in front of a mirror knowing that they are recorded. The results are experience by all audience in the gallery. The project was produced in 2011 as a commission of interactive art project for the new City Council of Madrid curated by Chema Conesa. “Videomaton” was presented in the opening of new City Council of Madrid located in the Cibeles square. The installation was exhibited for a year in the institution. The aim of the exhibit was displaying the famous art pieces of Madrid museums in a novel way.

BRIGITTE NIEDERMAIR

女权艺术家 摄影作品
the antidote

Brigitte Niedermair is an artist who expresses herself through photography. At the same time, she is a photographer who ventures deep into the disciplinary challenges of art. This cross-fertilisation between two worlds, an osmosis that she performs with great determination, has become the characteristic feature of all her work. The poetic content of her art has always found ideal form through her great mastery of the medium of photography. But never more so has the compositional balance and iconic component of her work been executed in such a lean and essential manner. They almost dissolve before the eye of the viewer, allowing the work to appear in its most subtle and immaterial dimension. Extending far beyond the subjects they portray, the photographs we see directly communicate Niedermair’s thoughts, feelings and personal inner journey. The concepts emerge with great power and immediacy, making space for themselves within the substance of photography. The abstraction creates figures which are authentic portraits.