Director:Jessica Tucker

Film: cycles

Bio: Cycles shows the body in defiance of philosophies and technologies that insist it be a clear, stable, isolated thing. Contemporary surveillance technology tracks our faces, bodies, and attention, singling us out for automated manipulation and control. In contrast, Cycles resists that totalizing gaze through playful misuses of tools that track and predict the body.

These chaotic bodies are the result of a multi-layered process of technological translation, misusing and coercing various body-tracking devices into mesmerizing dysfunction. First, face-detecting augmented reality applications are used on a collection of the artist’s own selfies, face-swapping and rephotographing these images on screens. Then, a custom machine learning model is trained on these distorted faces such that it can produce new faces based on this influence. Another custom ML model is trained to interpret input body images to be constructed out of the faces from the first model. The artist records motion-capture duet performance of herself with a dummy ragdoll and uses this data to animate digital avatars, which then are processed by the ML models.

This project can be shown with or without 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. She has been supported by the Fulbright Program, Chicago Artists Coalition, Thoma Foundation, DCASE, and the Mondriaan Fund, among others.