YouTube Mirror (2022-2023)
This is an interactive, audiovisual AI installation that generates images and sounds in response to the images of the audience captured through a camera in real time, in the form of an interactive mirror. YouTube Mirror uses a cross-modal generative machine model that was trained in an unsupervised way to learn the association between images and sounds obtained from the YouTube videos I watched. YouTube Mirror employs a concept of interactive mirror in digital media arts, as a way to represent how machine vision perceives the world. Since the machine represents the world solely based on its learned audio-visual relationship, the audience can see themselves through the lens of the machine’s vision with the machine-generated images and sounds. YouTube Mirror is an artistic attempt to simulate my unconscious, implicit understanding of audio-visual relationships that can be found in and limited by the videos. YouTube Mirror also attempts to represent the possibility of the machine’s bias inherent in a small-size video dataset which is possibly affected by video recommendation algorithms on YouTube, in an abstract and artistic way.