Deep Web

Deep Web is a performance about teaching fashion to a machine. Paris, January 2019: at Cinema Grand Rex, the fashion world is confronted with artificial intelligence – still unaware of the hype about to explode. American internet artist Signe Pierce presents Flora Miranda’s fashion collection in an absurd, fractured spectacle. Ten phone cameras livestream her performance across multiple public screens across Paris as each keynote slide (by Swiss media artist Simone C. Niquille) pairs with a matching fashion look (by Miranda), forming a step-by-step “how-to” on machine learning for fashion. The performance starts with “the dress”: A replication of transgener artist Amanda Lepore’s body shape. “The dress” is then prepared for machine learning, by 3D scanning, point cloud cleaning, segmentation, labelling and so on. Lepore's exaggerated representation of female beauty ideals serves as a foundation to explain how gender stereotypes are formed in machine training. The twisted, glitchy how-to show is not only educational. Signe relates to the audience’s overwhelm with the rapid (tech-)evolution by using a stuttering, distorted voice. And the performance underscores the idea that human identity transcends a binary understanding of male and female, a crucial nuance often lost in purely logical computer systems. By that, it also calls these creative professionals – individuals trained in perceiving and creating beauty, gender, style, context – to take part in database building, showing the crucial process of training these systems. The work incites critical thinking about artificial intelligence, gives a look behind the scenes and calls for active participation. “Who is the creator’s creator?” is a question Flora Miranda asks herself until today. She believes that artists and designers have to build computer systems to keep their creations personal and original in today’s AI-driven world. At the same time, she asks herself if “database-participation” by sharing our unique art through social media is all that artists can still do today? Now that the AI infrastructure is owned by a handful of multinationals? “Deep Web” is a work from 2019 and it reminds Flora Miranda that she once had this dream to build her own fashion AI model. It is a reminder to herself that such a model, built from an art conscious perspective, is needed right now, more than ever before.