Ghost in the Machine

Description

This piece is inspired by those 2010s computer vision / ML research papers on building a composite human face. I was curious what would happen if we were trying to do it with paper and scissors in the style of an excuisite corpse / Max Ernst collage. It uses face data from the Labeled Faces in the Wild dataset; they have special datasets where faces are pre-aligned such that eyes and mouth are lined up properly.

Design Process

I downloaded the dataset and pre-processed it using python; first, I extracted the images from the folder, and then gave then random names (they were initially alphabetical) so that they were mixed up. I then took a few thousand from there (it is a massive dataset) and put them into a zip file (the p5.js editor did not like having thousands of images uploaded and then downloaded by my sketch). The sketch itself is a relatively simple class that draws horizontal sections of each image in an alternating vertical sequence. The height of each strip is controllable using the vertical position of the mouse on the canvas. The canvas must remain square because the images were square and I didn't like the way the faces looked when stretched out.

Reflection

The results were scarier than I expected. Happy Halloween! I enjoyed playing with datasets usually used for computer science research, and in the future may look into doing that more.