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Thesis Info
- LABS ID
- 00914
- Thesis Title
- Object Americana
- Author
- Jeffrey Geiringer
- E-mail
- geiringer AT newschool.edu
- 2nd Author
- 3rd Author
- Degree
- MFA
- Year
- 2020
- Number of Pages
- 33
- University
- Parsons, The New School
- Thesis Supervisor
- Colleen Macklin
- Supervisor e-mail
- Colleen AT newschool.edu
- Other Supervisor(s)
- Anezka Sebek
- Language(s) of Thesis
- English
- Department / Discipline
- Design + Technology
- Copyright Ownership
- self
- Languages Familiar to Author
- English
- URL where full thesis can be found
- jjeffregeiringer.studio/documents/2020_geiringer-jeffrey_ObjectAmericana.pdf
- Keywords
- AI art, AI, sculpture, 3D GAN, point-cloud GAN, machine-human collaboration, AI sculpture, 3D printing
- Abstract: 200-500 words
- I am an artist working at the intersection of Machine Intelligence, digital manufacturing, and 3D space. Object Americana is a project that seeks to define a new medium of sculpture. This genre is defined on the terms that exist between my self and the Machine agents I have created to partner with. I have spent over a year choreographing and refining the process by which we work together, with the ultimate goal of creating pieces of physical material that are both fundamentally of the Machine and fundamentally of the Human.
Object Americana began as an attempt to prove a philosophical point: the Machine can be creative. Indeed, capital-M ‘Machine’ in the sense of an intelligent silicon-microchip agent which is able to experiment and learn about data it is exposed to in a fashion neither linear nor fully understandable by its Human designers. Indeed, capital-H ‘Human’ in the sense of a corresponding intelligent organic agent which is able to experiment and learn about data it is exposed to in a fashion neither linear nor fully understandable by its fellow Human peers. The Human agent also happens to be the forerunner of the Machine agent from an evolutionary standpoint. These are the terms on which the partnership is forged, the dance is choreographed, and perhaps the point is proven.
The result of this collaboration is a series of AI-driven sculptures, some of the first of their kind. They are examples of this new medium of sculpture, one in which a Machine learns about objects and begins to combine them in the form of point-clouds. The human then takes these resulting point-clouds and uses both algorithms and their own abstract sculptural skills to create a solid, 3D-printable object out of them.
For this particular, foundational project, the objects chosen to be combined were based on a questionnaire aimed at immigrants to the USA about their perceptions of the country. They were polled on what objects they associated with the country when they were children, currently in the present, and how they imagine the future. By this method, three sculptures representing the past, present, and future of American iconography were produced. Due to overwhelming poll responses, an overriding sculpture representing the totality of Americana was also produced.
In accordance with poll results, the ‘past’ sculpture is an AI-driven combination of the Statue of Liberty and the McDonald’s logo. The ‘present’ sculpture is a combination of a bust of Donald Trump and a large, suburban “McMansion” house. The ‘future’ sculpture is a combination of a guillotine and an e-bike. The ‘totality’ sculpture is a combination of the American flag and an AR-15 assault rifle.
This project extends and modifies the work of Dong Wook Shu, Sung Woo Park, and Junseok Kwon in their paper “3D Point Cloud Generative Adversarial Network Based on Tree Structured Graph Convolutions.”