Adam Broomberg

Going Full Time is an AI portrait, created by Adam Broomberg computational artist Isaac Schaal , and the transgender activist, artist and actress Gérsande Spelsberg. The work explores how artificial intelligence, trained on a vast dataset of hundreds of thousands of human faces, visually narrates the process of gender transition and the issues emerging around that — including the biases inherent in such datasets

The artists gave an AI algorithm a seemingly simple task, to start with a single analog image taken of Gersande on a 5”x4” negative and to try and visually illustrate what a gender transition would look like. The dataset that trained the AI taught it to create a linear spectrum between male and female. Walk in one direction, become more feminine, walk in the opposite direction, become more masculine. Hidden within the folds and valleys of this space, however, is the ghost of the dataset the AI was trained on, which carries the human decisions and biases that went into its creation. This work is an unedited version of its week of hard labour.

Adam Broomberg (born 1970, ZA) is an artist and a professor of Art at Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg. His forensic examination of the photographic medium engages a wide range of strategies from large format analogue film to images created by algorithms. All deployed in search of the very source-code of photography and always made in a collaborative mode. His work is held in many international collections including MoMa, The Tate Modern and The Centre Georges Pompidou. He lives and works in Berlin.Isaac Schaal (born 1997, US) creates conceptual and visual art using code and artificial intelligence. His art blurs the line between artificial and human intelligence, challenging viewers to reflect upon what ways they are, or are not, like a machine. His art explores value, empathy, humility, and our own algorithmic nature. He is a graduate of Minerva Schools at KGI, and lives and works in Fairbanks, Alaska.

-Text by Sara van Bussel