Filtered Views

© Tunday Akintan Adam Szklenar is a multimedia artist and composer. He holds three university degrees: cultural management, communications and media, and music. While he was a student at Goldsmiths University of London, he developed an interest in audiovisual composition, sound and visual design. His recent discovery is augmented reality. His vision is to create a new way of presenting original music and moving images.

In his work “Filtered Views,” Adam Szklenar deals with algorithms analyzing and synthesizing our reality. His poster has a square format – which is rather unusual in design. In the field of computer vision, however, the square format is ubiquitous because matrix calculations can be performed particularly effectively in this format. The increase of the square format in our everyday world is already an indication that algorithmic processes have a shaping effect on our reality.

While the poster as such merely represents an undefined face, it is transformed into a real face in augmented reality. At least it appears as such – but a closer look reveals minor errors that expose the fact that we are dealing with algorithmically generated portraits. Overlaid on these are terms used as categories for personalized advertising. “Filtered Views” asks what criteria we use to analyze the world; how these analyses, whether correct or incorrect, feed back into our reality in the form of generated content or predictions, and how we can make these processes perceptible to us.

We are all bombarded by targeted, personalized content online. AIs and algorithms analyze our data and use it to create a certain reality for, and instead of, us. I used real ad targeting categories from social media channels to visualize this noise composed of data both accurate or wrong, explicit or implicit, public or hidden. The faces are all AI-generated and belong to non-existent people. All pictures include apparent mistakes or spots where the AI guessed wrong – the same way as it does when it tries to make predictions about our personal interests. (The music is an original, unpublished composition).