I have always been an experimental artist.
At least insofar as the way I remember it.
I have stories that date back to Seattle in the 90s, and even before, in other places that feel like different lives at this point.
The first time I was exposed to AI, it was 2006, I think.
That was the first time I noticed it. There had been some truly silly headlines during that era. "MIT builds robot that can digest flies" and similar.
But I don't remember being especially concerned about it before we started talking about the problem of state AI on Twitter.
Even Google and Facebook's personalization systems, which ultimately destroyed the political systems worldwide seemed unthreatening compared to mass surveillance.
Big Brother.
The world your punk elders warned you about. And for some reason we remembered the warning more clearly then than we do now.
Maybe it's the passage of time.
Early facial recognition cameras were being used by governments globally, to identify and track people warrantlessly, with no assumption of wrongdoing.
A bit like the current frustration with Flock cameras, but mostly isolated to major cities.
At the time, I had just moved back to Minneapolis for the second time, and I found that I actually lived in a major city for the first time in a decade.
It wasn't that the idea of being watched on the street made me uncomfortable. But I was fascinated with how unreliable they were. Back then, the system was pretty simple, and you could run some fairly light facial recognition libraries on a beefy gaming computer.
And oh goodness, when I did... I discovered how joyously fucked up the whole system was at the time. I talked about it a lot at the time.
Going over the things I had discovered. Recognizing a hotdog as a face, for example in one experiment, or how I could pull the classifier to hallucinate dirt faces in sand or soil by adjusting the temperance and classification.
God it was fun.
Around the same time, I became involved with a small but global group of artists who used makeup and prosthetics to fool the machine in the most creative ways I had ever seen... and god fucking damnit, it's still some of the most beautiful and inspiring I've seen in this lifetime.
The kind of stuff that reminds you why you still consider yourself an artist.
I made some good friends, and there are a couple I still see around occasionally.
Anyway, the movement died down. The news and people in general were less concerned with it. I had a nasty divorce, and then I moved to Kansas City.
The later experiments are in my account of FaceApp, depth targeting, and noise painting.