Study for Self-Portrait

Kyle McDonald is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator whose work explores the intersection of technology and humanity. He crafts interactive and immersive audiovisual installations, performances, and new tools for creative exploration—building new communities and collaborations along the way. He uses techniques from computer vision, machine learning, and computing to ask questions about how we connect—and to imagine a shared future.

“Study for Self Portrait” connects McDonald’s recent work with machine learning to his earlier work as a generative visual artist from the early 2000s. “Study” is influenced by the ontological aesthetics of the failed 1980s artificial intelligence knowledge base and inference engine Cyc, and by the default aesthetics of TeX-based research paper diagrams. “Study” explores the nature of being human through generative diagrams of the ineffable, constructed in dialogue with a large language model. What does it mean to be human in an age of increasingly automated humanity?

Materials: Python, Graphviz, Gemini-1.5-Pro