How does AI technology mediate experience and fabricate reality?
CONTEXTUAL AND THEORETICAL STUDIES
2024
DESIGN RATIONAL
C.M.Y.K is a “critical object” depicting a series of printed polaroids. The aim is to highlight the means in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) is complicit in reproducing images that embrace the idea of standardization, appearance, and fabrication of reality. The simple act of taking a picture with a smartphone camera requires the system to navigate a series of steps that violates user privacy, allowing the images to be clear and desirable despite those violations.
The name comes from the kind of data and system that the smartphone camera allows the AI to access, which are:
(C.) Contact Details,
Algorithm, (.M),
Digital Memory (Y),
Social Media Network (K).
The transformation methodology approach comes from the readjustment of the term CMYK, commonly used for print design, and stands for; Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and key (Black). For each of these colours, a meaning has been assigned, allowing the person to understand the implications of using a smartphone camera that violates users’ privacy. In such a context, C.M.Y.K polaroids have been printed using the screen-printing process, which includes the separation of individual colours as highlighted above.
These terms of condition are displayed across these photographs, distorting the image’s ration, and to adjust that, the user is forced to fold the image and hide those warnings. This emulates the idea that, to have a clear and desirable image, the user must ignore the violation of privacy imposed by the AI. This feeds to the idea of appearance, in which our society will trade their privacy to enrich their appearance in the public arena.
The photos used for the realization of this artefact have been personally shot by me throughout 2023, and consequently posted on social media, where they have been modified using filters available on these platforms. The act of polishing an image when presented to the public feeds into the idea of standardization imposed by the means of AI. This is also the reason a screen- printing process has been used in the realization of C.M.Y.K, to mimic the use of filters on social media.
C.M.Y.K images have been printed and designed as polaroids cards to highlight the correlation between the digital world, now fueled by AI, and the effect that this has in the “real” world. As these images are representative of everyday life, some handwritten writings have been added in order to enrich the idea that these polaroids belong to the offline world, even though they have been modified by AI.
SKILLS AND TECHNIQUES USED ▼
Design Research
Graphic Design
Branding
Photography
Photoshop