Director:Jessica Tucker

Film: pooling

Bio: Computational processes of all kinds depend on sources of random numbers for their accuracy and efficacy, but computers cannot generate genuine randomness on their own because they work algorithmically. So natural sources are needed. For instance, the digital encryption company, Cloudflare, directs a camera at a wall of lava lamps and measures the image to extract random numbers that make their encryption processes reliable. As a natural being, I too must be essentially indeterminate, though the technologies I interface with daily track my movements and attention in an ongoing attempt to represent and predict me.

In machine learning, diffusion models use noise to deconstruct and then predictively recreate what they are fed of reality. For the pooling video series, I trained a custom machine learning model on a massive collection of distorted selfie images I had made through an incessant process of misusing faceswapping AR filters. I used this model to generate several new faces. To collage these new faces together, I used computer generated fractal noise, a type of random visual pattern used in digital graphics to simulate natural shapes and motion. Creating layers of these noise patterns, I “cut out” the images and stack them together with a few other simple digital effects, creating fluid-like animations evocative of lava lamps.

This project can be shown in various installation arrangements Each of the 4 videos is a seamless loop with no sound.

Jessica Tucker is an artist and educator working primarily in the fields of digital art and multimedia performance to explore how technological vision constructs the body and the self. Most recently, she was a Grant Wood Fellow in Interdisciplinary Performance at the University of Iowa. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and previously studied at Wellesley College, MIT, and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally, including Rewire Festival, FOAM Museum of Photography, Goethe Institut, the Van Gogh Museum, and Mana Contemporary. I have been supported by the Fulbright Program, Chicago Artists Coalition, Thoma Foundation, DCASE, and the Mondriaan Fund, among others.