Project proposal

What do you want to make?


Working title: (sur)face
In the first year of Piet Zwart I have been looking at LGBT related topics. I mostly did so from a personal subjective perspective in photography, and by looking into queer cinema. In the presentation of the second term I made clear that I wanted to be make a statement with my work, be more political. As feedback the tutors told me I already make a statement in the work that I make.

Ideally, as a graduation proposal, I would to continue with the three lines of thought I’ve been working on in the first year. The photographic medium in itself (and the methodology of the ‘table’ not the tableau’) , making the (gay) cinematic language my own combined with CGI and LGBT issues/identity. As an end result I would like to bring these three things together, though it might still be loose entities. I think It could be interesting to work towards an installation through curation of the material I will gather.

One of the actualities that caught my fascination is the study “Deep Neural Networks (DNN) can detect sexual orientation from faces” by Yilun Wang and Michael Kosinski. It claims that faces contain information about sexual orientation and that AI can interpreted this better than humans. An Artificial Intelligence Gaydar so to say. According to the study gay men and women tend to have gender-atypical facial morphology, expression and growing style. This corresponds with the idea of PHT (prenatal hormone theory).
This theory asserts the following:

“(…)same-gender sexual orientation stems from the underexposure of male fetuses and overexposure of female fetuses to prenatal androgens responsible for the sexual differentiation of faces, preferences and behavior” (Wang, Kosinski, page 30).”

Several questions arise from this assertion. Such as:

At this stage the research remains very incomplete and has a lot of ‘what if’s’. The theory could even be wrong, but I am more interested in the possibilities or perhaps the dangers/dread in these technologies for the LGBT community. There is for example a possibility of a dystopian future; if in the wrong hands, state sponsored homophobia/transphobia could be further implemented through technology.

With this information, I would like to propose a video, not directly showing people’s faces being scanned (or something obvious like that) but related to the surface of one’s identity or about the surface in general (this I think relates to photography as a medium aswell). I imagine a short film with overlapping footage (my own and found footage). Where fiction is blended with actualities related to the above mentioned. I will look at queer cinema and its representation and also will try to involve people from my ‘bubble’, for example friends, acquaintances and other people from the community. They will be ask to perform, pose or talk in my work.