This Patriot Does Not Exist

-- AV loop // 42 sec. // sound by trohi -- The minted video is a prelude to my upcoming work Патриотизатор: an interactive AI installation. Патриотизатор delves into the politics of aesthetics by analysing the visible marks of the patriotic subculture. It is a response to the ideology and aesthetic of the contemporary patriot. 1187 publicly-available photographs from social media profiles of users who openly identify as patriots are fed into a GAN network to train an Artificial Intelligence on patriotic looks. The trained network is then incorporated into an interactive algorithm that allows you to “patriotise” your own portrait. The result is a morphing video between the spectators’ and generated patriots’ portraits. А distinctive feature of the aesthetics of patriotism is the focus on male dominance: one of the few semantic connections between the original image of the patriot and the contemporary one. However, the current patriot is no longer a brave warrior, but rather a cultural avatar of toxic masculinity and neo nationalism. From who and how is the patriot protecting us? Is he adequate in the context of our globalising era? These are some of the questions, which Патриотизатор is aiming to raise through an interaction with an AI installation. The NFT itself is a latent space interpolation of the patriotic AI network that has been heavily post-processed using SubstanceAlchemist, C4D, TouchDesigner and AfterEffects. GAN code used: StyleGAN2-ADA-PyTorch by Tero Karras, Miika Aittala, Janne Hellsten, Samuli Laine, Jaakko Lehtinen, Timo Aila