dnoh-sectionD-lookingoutwards08

Person: Kyle McDonald

Kyle McDonald terms himself as an “artist working with code”. He, I believe, is based on Los Angeles, California and studied computer science and art.

Honestly, I didn’t find his presentation to be too great, both content and presentation wise. First of all, he did not even have a presentation ready, rather he had folders with images and videos he showed to the audience through the Macbook’s preview function. But I guess, as he emphasized in the beginning of his speech, this was a more “informal presentation”. However, after looking through a couple of his projects, I was captured by his creativity and coding sense.

For example, he had an installation/project in Korea and Japan where he connected the two countries through facial recognition. I found it intriguing that he, someone who had experimented with facial swapping since at least 2011, was able to develop his knowledge within this field enough to categorize and match people so fluidly through merely positioning and expressions.

Much like this installation he had projects that made a computer force a person to draw themselves in contour (blind) where the program and machine moved the hand of the person based on what facial features and shape the machine was able to grasp.