Strange Fruit

Mal Som’s “Strange Fruit” is a masquerade of unfamiliar faces, appearing in a boldly colored procession with varied degrees of realism and abstraction. Blurry forms are replaced by four-eyed mask-like faces in a rhythm that takes us on a journey both frightening and introspective. The artwork explores the phenomenon of “mode collapse,” when only a single type of image is produced. It is not fully understood why this happens, only that it is a constant occurrence—the only constant in latent space. Som trains the model until a full collapse happens and then iterates on the dataset with augmenting, duplicating, and looping in generated images from previous instances to steer the collapse. This gives the series of images a certain sense of fragility and determination at the same time.