Preview
Creation Date
2026
Dimensions
129 1/2 x 9 1/2 Inches
Materials
Inkjet on Photoluster
Medium
Photography
Medium
Digital
Project Advisor
Rob Neilson, Benjamin D. Rinehart
Year of Graduation
2026
Description
1923 images of the authors face as selected by facial recognition softwares stretched to 1px by the product of their width and height compiled in a 1923px by 39000px print.
Rights
Copyright for this work is held by the artist.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Keywords
Digital Archive, Digital Image, Photography, Portraiture, Family, Computer Vision, Data Science, Computer Science, Facial Recognition, Image Diffusion
Artist Statement
Hardly knowing a world of images not shared with and platformed by machines, Violet Scott navigates her position in the world as a statistically identifiable and categorizable series of numbers in data tables generated by physical pixel sensors in a camera obscura. In the footsteps of German filmmaker Harun Farocki and contemporary American photographer Trevor Paglen, Scott explores how algorithmic analyses of images have come to dominate both the production and interpretation of images, a departure spurred by late 20th century automated missile and drone guidance technology and the prevalence of surveillance technologies in our day to day lives. Scott welcomes these developments in visual culture because she finds no other choice; she then asks the viewer to step into a visual world that blends the art gallery with an experience of observation rarely made visible to humans.
Like humans, computer vision models must learn the rules of denotation in visual representations. Researchers nurture their programs on training sets with thousands to millions of images, creating a system where the epistemic relevance of each image is made by its over or underrepresentation. This idea is not new to the art gallery; the act of framing or placing on a pedestal an art object shapes culture and communicates ideology by visual means not necessarily reliant on textual, verbal, or physical modes. An ideology, no matter how subtle or overt in its representation, then gains relevance in its iteration, an idea familiar to advertisers and propagandists but tuned and accelerated to a degree limited only by microchip size and datacenters. This comparison is not to anthropomorphize the machine, but rather to mechanamorphize the human. If digital images are both means of communicating ideology propagated by a platform, and reducible to pixel values in a matrix driven by profit margins and user engagement, the value in viewing pivots at the expense of the viewer.
Portrait of Walden Kirsch considers the first digital image, a film photograph of a researcher’s infant son scanned in 1957, while Self Portrait shows 2000 images of Scott’s face taken over the last 6 years of her life selected and cropped using facial recognition programs. These works are then stripped using an early facial recognition method that reforms an image from an aspect ratio we are accustomed to viewing, to an image one pixel wide by the product of its height and width, suitable to be retrofitted into matrices for algorithmic exploitation. Portrait of Walden Kirsch maintains the original dimensions and pixels per inch of the scan and connects the viewer from the genesis of the digital archive and its potential for vulnerability and connection, to its use as an illiberal regulatory and invasive device. In Self Portrait, Scott explores the construction of self identity in the milieu of the digital archive, a swarming array of ever changing signs optimized to the ends of their platforms.