FIGURES, £IGUR€$, GO FIGURE?!

Collaboration with Libby Heaney

FIGURES, £igur€$, go figure? is a groundbreaking video essay that explores the intersection of computer vision, art history, and human anatomy.

The forthcoming artwork, Figures in Limbo, is a partially playable 3D animation that delves into the representation of the human body in both datasets and western art history. Through playful deconstruction and a critical lens, the piece investigates how cultural and historical biases are now being translated into code, highlighting the continued search for the ideal body in the age of AI. The narrative of the artwork is initially composed by an AI, which weaves together descriptions of so-called canonical artworks and academic papers on AI pose estimation.

However, artists Barney and Heaney challenge this narrative by opening up space for other possibilities and presenting alternative bodies that evade the gaze of computer vision. As part of the greater piece, Barney has also been developing a process to make sound with quantum data, further expanding the boundary-pushing nature of the work.