multi-channel – BENJAMIN DE KOSNIK

sarf-2017

Smithsonian Art Research Fellowship

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqhURxmFU1A&autoplay=1&loop=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&w=480&h=270]

Three LED displays, wall mounts, 3 media files, 2 lights, 2 framed photos, 2 cloth pots, one rug, one sofa, two freestanding tumbleweed sculptures. Dimensions H x L x W (9′ x 9′ x 9′).2016

Marhihuana Smokes Herself, installation details with a five minute video clip of the middle screen.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFsByaaer1Y&autoplay=1&loop=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&w=480&h=270]

Two to six channel video art installation. Two to six 34 inch LED televisions, wall-mounted adjacent to each other in landscape orientation, synchronized 19:44 minute 1080p loops.2015

Equal Weight Uhuras

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MCVuyrZ0Qw&autoplay=1&loop=1&rel=0&h=270&w=480&showinfo=0]

Variable-size video art installation. One or two 34 inch LED televisions, wall-mounted in portrait orientation to be adjacent or line-of-sight, two 54:00 minute 1080p synchronized loops.2015

Asama Loops

Support Material

Proposal (draft 6)
Nam June Paik Timeline

Marihuana Smokes Herself

Three LED displays, wall mounts, 3 media files, 2 lights, 2 framed photos, 2 cloth pots, one rug, one sofa, two freestanding tumbleweed sculptures. Dimensions H x L x W (9′ x 9′ x 9′).

2016

Three channel video installation featuring a supercut of clips extracted from film and television depicting cannabis use, production, and distribution. My practice is to watch media and note any cannabis on the screen, as if I were a media censor in a time and space of total cannabis prohibition. Over time,this process has created a growing archive of clips that depict cannabis as a character in the larger war on drugs. The sequenced clips in this video installation use this archive, but only the parts that contain a female character on the screen. This subset is further shaped by new searches gathered from exit interviews, and then using these terms to create subsequent loops with suggested searches such as “giggling,” power and money, dealing, actual medical use, and others.

Artist Statement
Loop Component Detail/Audit

Equal Weight Uhuras

Two to six channel video art installation. Two to six 34 inch LED televisions, wall-mounted adjacent to each other in landscape orientation, synchronized 19:44 minute 1080p loops.

2015

Samples six characters from two seasons of Star Trek episodes, and re-constructs two seasons in a condensed form, where all the characters have the same amount of “screen time” as the character Uhura, with the added proviso that all the characters are shown talking equally to each other in a random fashion, or conversing alone with a representation of space.

Asama Loops

Benjamin De Kosnik - Asama Loops

Asama Loop 6 Roji (left), 2015
3:15 minutes, 1920 x 1080

Asama Loop 6 Vsync 8 (right), 2015
5:13 minutes, 1920 x 1080

Asama Loop 6 Vband 4 (left), 2015
1:00 minutes, 1920 x 1080

Asama Loop 6 Pink Buddah Dot (right), 2015
5:13 minutes, 1920 x 1080

Two-channel video art installation, size variable. One or two 34 inch LED televisions, wall-mounted in portrait orientation to be adjacent or line-of-sight, two 54:00 minute 1080p synchronized loops.

2015

A site-specific video art installation, inspired by artist books produced by foreign artists visiting Japan: Kathan Brown (Paradise, 1982), John Cage (Silence, 1961), and Birgit Skiold (Zen Gardens, 1973). This work combines the transnational print and video aesthetics of three countries into a new hybrid form. Not wishing to be bound to a fixed form on paper, a visual machine constantly creates new video combinations from three main sources: the garden landscapes posted on social media at the Nezu Museum in Japan, three pure colors, and multiplications of pure color with printing plate engraving marks and noise. The generated images are re-inscribed from paper to a video screen with the carousel swipes of the contemporary mobile web mixed with simulated vertical rolls and glitch found in experimental video art by Nam June Paik and Andy Warhol. The result is a combinatoric, ever-changing iconography machine spanning contemporary San Francisco, Tokyo, and London.

Asama OG

Valentine Homography

Two Channel Video Art Installation. Two 34 inch LED televisions, wall-mounted to be touching in landscape orientation, two 19:44 minute 1080p synchronized loops playing a metadata composition generated by combining portrait photography, tumblr and pinterist social media image scrapes, and computer vision software.

2015

Experiments with color contour detection in images, using the SURF homography algorithm in the Open Source Computer Vision (OpenCV) software library. I apply this algorithm as a Trevor Paglen-defined seeing machine to social media images: profile portraits, liked images, and disliked images. This computational lens simulates computer matchmaking in a visual form that is but one instance in a sea of many thousand “known-good” or positive test cases that the machine learning behind websites such as Facebook, Tindr, Grindr, OkCupid, Match.com, Jdate.com, etc. must crunch to create a single user’s match.

To create this positive test case, I collaborated with my real-life partner to stage ten normcore portraits counter to the prevailing profile portraiture aesthetic, collected forty images from each of our preferred social medias that were positive, and ten that were negative. These input images were used by the machine learning system to simulate what a positive match “looks like” when using its “match the humans” algorithm.

Why Algorithm

The Machine Is Learning The Man Trap

Week One

Week Two

Week Three

3 weeks, 2 LED displays, articulating wall mounts, pink-filtered sunlight, 8 media files. Dimensions H x L x W (6′ x 6′ x 1′).

2014

Durational video installation. Displayed videos are generated from a computational media project that uses facial and object recognition technology to create new characters and situations in classic media texts.

Two screens are mounted on a wall, slightly pointed inwards so that the shadows of the screens create eye-shaped shadows. Each screen shows a loop, which is changed every week. As the weeks progress, “the machine” leans more about detecting and recognizing faces: simultaneously recognizing more characters with greater accuracy, and yet at the same time negating the human form with an algorithmic representation of the covered face. By the last week, all faces are replaced with faceless humans with an accumulation of algorithmic depictions.

Ten Thoughts on Detection and Recognition
All the Uhuras on Paper
Notes on The Machine Is Learning
The Disquiet Artist Rant
Machine Learning Initial Statement