MECHANICAL DESIGN IN THE AGE OF NATURAL REPRODUCTION
‘From a machine point of view, this is the new haute couture. An AI can look like a human, can speak like a human, can think like a human. But what it cannot do is propagate. What makes a human special is the ability to do that, so that is what an AI will highlight as sexual selection, which is the same for humans as our natural selection.’
My research into beauty in humans led me from the time before technology, where natural selection defined our view of beauty, to the time where technology changed our view to sexual selection with the help of independence of propagation like birth control or egg freezing. Asking the question “what if the machine decides for the human”, I trained my AI on a haute couture dataset and made two designs into physical pieces. These I displayed in an etalage installation, showing a video in the back of how the AI looks at the world, classifying everything as fertile and sexually attractive.
2021
