Portrait Landscape

A video art piece I created that was shown at Hauser and Wirth NYC and The International Center for Photography in NYC.

For Portrait Landscape, I wrote software that uses computer vision to find faces in Michelangelo Antonioni's movie Blow-Up (1966). The software often misrecognizes faces, finding them in a field of grass, for example, or in the folds of someone’s clothes.

I used Blow Up as my source material because the main character of the film, who is trying to solve a murder he inadvertently photographed, is not unlike the autonomous software agents that now scour the Internet, indexing images. He is a kind of automaton, always on the move; constantly snapping photos, leaving abruptly, jumping and running. He keeps zooming into the pictures he’s taken, frustrated that they don’t solve anything. There’s something in the futility of the protagonist’s search that parallels the futility of my software’s search for faces in the film.

The scenes selected themselves in a sense. I had my software make a cut in the film anytime there was a face recognized in the scene. I then used editing software to pan and zoom in on the misrecognized faces to draw attention to them. The film is cut down to about ten minutes and only features scenes with the misrecognized faces, giving it a humorous and haunting effect.