Selfgen

Following the launch of Marion Schneider's web work Selfgen on both TOPO's and Virtual Mutek's websites for a month during the summer of 2022, TOPO has decided to continue exhibiting Selfgen through a window projection. On Thursday, November 17th at 5pm, during the launch of the video installation, we will offer you to experience simultaneously the web component of Selfgen (to be discovered at topo.art/selfgen) on a large touch screen.

Selfgen evokes the idea of queer identity and self-representation through advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning processes. Working with a database of over 500 personal selfies accumulated on their cell phone, Marion Schneider teaches an artificial intelligence algorithm (StyleGAN) to craft new images of themselves. By playing with the parameters of this learning process and the images provided, an infinite number of self-portraits are generated and combined to create a video portrait in constant motion, which by its abstraction is ambiguous and evokes fluidity and impermanence.

Marion Schneider

As a non-binary digital artist, Marion Schneider (she/they) has a degree in Visual and Media Arts from UQAM (Montréal) and Digital Design from l’École Nationale Supérieure Olivier De Serres (Paris). Obsessed with the sea, words and machines, they work with digital tools in a both poetic and political way. Schneider’s interdisciplinary practice focuses on sentimentalism as a philosophy and its interactions and subversions of popular understandings and uses of technology.
Rooted in hacktivist ideology, their work is often autonomous, permeable and functions in a loop, integrating data sharing and reuse. They are interested in themes from nature and virtuality, to gender, intimacy, distance and memory; their work considers the ways each of these subjects intersect.
Schneider has exhibited their work in several exhibitions in Montréal and Québec City, including at ICRA-X, Place des Arts, Art Mûr and Galerie de l'UQAM, among others.

schneidermarion.net

@_marionschneider