This is 1 of 10 unique animations that make up a body of work called Going. Full time. The ownership of this work is equally shared between the photographer / artist Adam Broomberg, the subject / model Gersande Spelsberg and the computational artist / AI coder Isaac Schaal.
I met the actress and model Gersande Spelsberg (aka Gigi) in the summer of 2020 in Berlin on the dating app Tinder. Our relationship soon grew into a creative and collaborative one. Gigi went through sex reassignment surgery 5 years ago. Transitioning is a complicated process that involves any or all of the gendered aspects of a person's life, which include aesthetics, social roles, legal status, and biological aspects of the body. Gigi is not someone who does anything half-heartedly and her description of the physical and emotional pain but also the utter liberation and beauty involved in going full time was awe inspiring. Collaborating with the computational artist Isaac Schaal, I wanted to understand how an artificial intelligence would visually narrate the process of gender transitioning. We gave an AI algorithm a seemingly simple task. To start with a single analogue image I took of Gigi on a 5”x4” negative and to try and visually illustrate what a gender transition would look like. We scanned the negative and fed it into a neural network consisting of millions of artificial neurons and the millions of connections between them. Trained by AI researchers on a massive dataset of hundreds of thousands of human portraits, the AI has learned to map what it believes to be all possible variations of the human face into a multi-dimensional space: the latent space. In this space, moving in any direction (a latent walk) causes the face to change, with different directions corresponding to different changes (face shape, hair color, eye color, hair shape and length, etc.) We have to imagine this latent space not as flat like a photograph but a space with thousands of dimensions. Each face is a point in that space. 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.The AI alone created the latent space, encoding these avenues of change into its multi-dimensional understanding of the human face. 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. These are unedited versions of its week of hard labour. Baked into the NFT contract is a condition that the subject of the work (Gigi) shares authorship with the photographer (Adam) and the AI programmer (Isaac) and therefore shares in the revenue of the primary sale and any subsequent sales on the secondary market. This, perhaps for the first time, inverts the one way flow of power that has haunted photography since its’ inception.