Toward Uncanny Lineages

 Research Portfolio

01 - In Serial Portraits, participants draw me while looking at my face but never at their paper. I am the model; they make the portrait. At the same time, their own face is recorded. The drawing is then revealed, and their reaction becomes part of the work.

The project began in 2001 and has developed through performances, video, installations and later virtual reality. What interests me is not likeness, but what happens in the encounter: attention, loss of control, and the return of the image to the person who made it.

Serial Portraits during a residency in Irkutsk, Siberia. The participant draws the artist without looking at the paper.

A participant in Serial Portraits, Paris.

02 — Another participatory system

ICI ELA is a separate participatory work. Eighty participants recorded their changing states of mind through colours, using personal codes whose meanings remained undisclosed. Their 6,400 choices were later brought together in a collective image. I include it here as an earlier example of my interest in individual contribution, accumulation and return.

03 — From body to avatar
Serial Portraits / Uncanny You!

04 — Toward Uncanny Lineages

Earlier AI research from Uncanny Echoes: a blind drawing becomes the starting point for successive visual interpretations. These experiments led me to ask what would happen if the resulting image were no longer an endpoint, but became the model for another participant.