Siavash Naghshbandi

Daily Life of Human

Daily Life of Human by Siavash Naghsbandi is a fast-paced series of still images selected by the artist from ImageNet, which is a massive dataset of images (about 14 million) produced by BigGAN. Generative Adversarial Networks, or GANs for short, are AI (machine learning) programs capable of generating (synthesizing, not finding) high-quality images. BigGAN is trained on how to make a certain type of image and then starts producing new images like those it learned from. Naghsbandi uses BigGAN’s output to present a rapid sequence of images that, if seen individually, are uncanny—a strange and off-kilter version of the world we inhabit. But when seen at high speed the viewer only catches glimpses of what looks like a world slightly askew, figures a bit grotesque. The sounds are recorded by Naghsbandi , from his daily life in Tehran, combined with sounds downloaded from the internet. Together with the computer-generated voice, and the script written by Naghsbandi, the result is an elegant combination of human and non-human production. One might even say a collaboration between the artist and an AI: the subject and speaker is neither entirely human, nor AI but a blend of both.