She arrived one afternoon, well into the hazy downturn of the last half-arsed hour of the workday. Her smile came first – well, a smile was a stretch – perhaps more a baring of teeth.
A push of Photoshop’s slider elicited a frown, next, a quizzical look. Ten years added, twenty years removed. Then, weariness, impatience, all the while eyes obscured by black lashes. Finally, with one more slide, she looked up and past me, at someone it seemed,
her eyes an angry databased blue.
She had arrived – her digital reanimation an uncanny
resumption of a lost 1967 photo-shoot.
***
As an obsessive collector of vintage magazines, my work often calls upon the printed past to speculate on the future of AI within visual communication. The results span a spectrum touching upon the uncanny and absurd to uncomfortable and toxic. This work is based upon the moment I came across a Fairydown ad from a June 1967 edition of The New Zealand Weekly News. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was about the combination of the deep red satin quilt and the model’s voluminous blonde bouffant. It struck a discordant chord that prompted an uncomfortable pause – what was happening outside that frame?
A year later, on another tangent, Photoshop had just released its latest feature—the Smart Portrait filter. Using neural networks, the AI-driven filter can alter expressions, age and lighting. Curious to see if it could be used on low-resolution offset printed photos, I ran a series of images through it with varying results. It was during this last-minute, half-an-hour-to-kill experiment that an awkward memory was triggered.
While working as a junior at an ad agency, my colleague and I were tasked with developing an ad campaign; however, we quickly realised we had less control than desired. Much to our chagrin, the client insisted on using a young shop assistant as the model for the shoot. When we arrived, this chagrin transformed into an uncomfortable silence as we realised the model was to pose semi-naked on a deep red upholstered couch.
During this long afternoon shoot, my awareness of the different gazes in the room grew: the boss’s son’s sneaked glimpses (he didn’t need to be there); the client’s insistent leer of satisfaction; the unfazed critical eye of the photographer and his assistants; her blank yet seductive stare into the camera; and finally my flitting, mystified glances, struggling to make eye contact as the only other woman in the room.
Stranger still was the subsequent weeks spent poring over the details of her body, placing it just right into ad layouts, brochures, billboards... She was no longer the only other woman in the room with me that afternoon, but now an edited entity consisting of paper, plastic and ink. I was a woman complicit in constructing a hyperreal composite. Those hours made me wonder what her experience of the shoot was, what she thought about the sequential requests to look up, down, lift your chin... How did she feel when she finally saw her transformation to a two-dimensional, billboard-sized version of herself from that afternoon?
From this dual experience of direction and construction comes a flood of ethical questions, especially surrounding the role we all play in complicity and agency. An inhabitant of a pre-Internet world, the Fairydown model’s expectations of where her image would be used were likely contemporary, confined to the printed distribution of the ad and perhaps a filing cabinet somewhere.
But now, her image—like the twenty-first-century model from the shoot—had migrated, via my hand, to the digital space of the Photoshop interface. I wondered about my 1960s doppelgänger. Who was in the room with her? How was she navigating that space? Whose gaze was she engaging with? Her reanimation was another hyperreal composite woman, but this time anachronistic, born of photographic film and paper but brought to life by pixels and code.