Scan GAN is a series of portraits generated by an AI program which the artist has then distorted using various apps.  The resulting images are a disturbing blend of polyhedral human faces.

 

With AI being able to represent the human form so accurately and with the technology almost certain to improve, Scan GAN imagines what the future could look like if humans and AI merged.

 

What would this mean for issues surrounding gender, identity and race?  Could we have a new technological gender hybrid?

 

To create these artworks the artist has collected pictures created by an AI program known as a GAN (generative adversarial network). The GAN uses information from stored collections of pictures to create its own portraits of people.  Herne has then scanned and recorded these images using very simple photogrammetry software (3D scanning) to create an abstracted 3D portrait of the computer-generated person.  The result is the skewed portraits which sit between 2D and 3D forms.