Untitled 2 (Kiss me.)

Providing an unexpected and delightful pairing of audio and visuals, these five new digital works by Casey Reas and Jan St. Werner were initially inspired by Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills series and the 35mm camera-less films of Stan Brakhage. Collectively called Compressed Cinema, they were created with contemporary machine learning algorithms, specifically generative adversarial networks (GANs) trained by Reas. Accompanied by St. Werner’s perfectly timed soundtracks, each quick flash frame of recognizable images burns a memory onto your retina, making the viewer wonder, seconds later, was that what I thought it was? All five works are haunting and beautiful, with the images and audio playing gratifying tricks on your senses. Quote: “Like a camera, a GAN is an apparatus that can be used by an artist to make pictures. The quality of the image that is created with the apparatus has everything to do with how the artist uses it and little to do with the machine itself,” states Reas.