Artists

Livia Foldes

Press release

In her series NSFW Venus, she appropriates and alters images from a pornography-detection dataset to reflect on the parallels between colonial archives and machine learning datasets.

From phrenology to sexology, NudeNet is only the latest imaging technology employed to sort our complex identities and behavior into rigid categories of race, gender, and obscenity. Its stolen training data constitutes a new kind of photographic archive with familiar aims — surveillance, censorship, and control. Today, as in the past, institutions use technologies of vision and quantification to transform bodies into data — and use that data to classify, predict, discipline and erase.

Foldes is influenced by Filipino artist Stephanie Syjuco's use of Photoshop’s “healing brush” to remove subjects from prison mugshots in anthropological archives. By using these tools, the artist asks what healing could mean for machine learning archives that are endlessly copied and recirculated?