#MadewithFacet

These images were #madewithFacet — a content-aware image editor commissioning artists to explore the creative possibilities of their software. After my initial conversation with the team, I was interested in how digital intelligence both forms and deforms creative agency. How could Facet help me to blow up a lifetime of learned techniques, recomposing them in radically new ways? In 'Machine Leaning' I took photographs of one of Facet's Software Engineers through zoom. I wanted to recreate my impression of somebody that I had only ever met inside a computer screen. Although the conversations I had while I was taking this picture felt real and inspirational, there was something about the encounter that was transient and unpredictable at the same time. Allowing me to edit content not pixels, Facet heightened my aesthetic awareness, changing my creative process in unthinkable ways. 'Lovers Spit' started over a few years ago. I was taking photographs of men in their underwear in the hope of 'exploring' the female gaze. When I started working with these images in Facet, breast, holes and mouths began touching each other in new ways. Although evocative and intimate, these bodies were only pixels, their flesh somehow disembodied by the algorithms that moved them. I thought of dating aps and the way they create the illusion of touch while at the same time disembodying our perceptions of connection and intimacy. Does it really matter whether algorithms are powerful enough to help us meet our winning match? Or is the power of projecting on to empty pixels the artificial spark now needed to ignite real attractions between bodies in physical space.