outsourced narcissism
This installation consists of a computer, a robotic arm with a camera attached and a mirror mounted to the wall. The computer is running a custom trained artificial intelligence object detection neural network at the same time it controls the movements of the robot. The AI model is being trained to recognize the robot thus the robot looks in the mirror with its camera attempts to recognize itself. If it does, the computer draws an annotation box around the image of the robot with the label of “me”. When the box is drawn, the robot moves in relation to where the box is located within its field of view. The box has a percentage of certainty that shows how sure the artificial intelligence model is that it sees itself. If the level of certainty is above 85% the system will take and post a selfie on its personal Instagram account @outsourced_narcissism. The system saves the images it collects and automatically uses them to retrain the artificial intelligence model conceivably making the robot more and more proficient at identifying and posting images. In this way, the robot’s increasing self-awareness enables it to continually look for, attempt to identify and post images of itself.
