Reference: TOYA001
Title: Paint Your Face Away
Date: 2019
Author: Shinji Toya
Details: Workshop tools and a web-based, interactive, anti-facial recognition face painter originally commissioned by Fotomuseum Winterthur.
Media: Images
Credit: Courtesy of the artist and participants

Description: The digital face painting tool is inspired by Frank Bowling’s paintings. Participants use the painter to create their profile pictures while running a real-time face detection on the image of a face being painted so that at one point the profile picture stops being detected by the computer vision through the painting process. In this way, the digital paint acts as a type of disruptive noise for the machine.

The workshop explores how the figuration of a recognisable “face” in the eye of the machine is obscured by the fluid digital paint and the discontinuous textures and patterns.

Curation Reference: TOYA018
Title: Paint Your Face Away [Paintings]
Date: 2013–15
Author: Shinji Toya
Details: These images were a few of hundreds of the painting examples I made in 2013-2015, and after that, the paintings were digitised and used for my art practice.
Media: Experiments
Credit: Courtesy of the artist

Description: I approached the paintings with a series of procedures that would generate varied, bifurcating compositions in multi-coloured mixtures in chance-oriented manners. This kind of material driven, (perhaps) analogue generativity has been inspiring how I work with my practice of generative new media art.

The material and analogue (i.g. unquantified) nature of the making of the paintings had been letting me speculate how it may contrast with the computational quantification of recent techno-capitalism operations, at least symbolically. This type of thought process contributed to my creative practice.

Reference: TOYA003
Title: Paint Your Face Away [MIRO]
Date: 2020
Author: Shinji Toya
Details: MIRO process sketches
Media: Website
Credit: Courtesy of the artist

Description: Facial recognition technology is increasingly used for regulatory systems and commercial gain. The face painting we play with here could be used to resist the automated scraping of the digitised faces and introduce useless noise to the biometric datafication of faces being done in service of facial recognition.

As Hito Steyerl suggests, faces are quantified pixels less and less owned by us. But could we try to claim the ownership back to us through the painterly resistance?

Reference: TOYA005
Title: 3 Years and 6 Months of Digital Decay
Date: 2016
Author: Shinji Toya
Details: Digital video of a website with an algorithm that affects the uploaded video in real-time, commissioned by arebyte Gallery.
Media: Website
Credit: Courtesy of the artist

Description: The video speculates about aesthetic meanings of forgetting in the digital age. As months and years pass, the image of the video on the website will be more and more fragmented, and the code for the fragmentation effect becomes slightly outdated so that the video starts to fail in certain browsers.

These processes of “decay” continued until the video disappeared on 7th October 2019. The period between this last screening date and the launch date corresponds with the average lifetime of burned CD-R media, that is three and half years. The website is built as an experimental platform to stage a decaying data online.

In each CD-R there is an audio file that is a sound piece/narrated instruction to direct the listener to the URL for the online screening site (shinjitoya.com/3years-and-6month-of-digital-decay | http://storage-un.it/is_there_beauty_in_forgetting).

In this sense, the CD-Rs become a physical reminder to the website artwork, so that the viewers may witness the progress of the digital decay. The gesture of deletion and the staging of the digital decay, symbolically resist and critique the online environment of corporate data surveillance built in the first decade of the millennium and the digital’s ability of total recall for the user’s online activities that were once assumed to be “private”. Alongside this subtly political gesture, the artist explores the Japanese aesthetics of Wabi-Sabi, an idea related to the beauty of impermanence and transience.

Curation Reference: TOYA019
Title: System Stories and Model Worlds: A Critical Approach to Generative Art
Date: 2006
Author: Mitchell Whitelaw
Details: This paper proposes a critical approach to the interpretation of software-based generative art, focusing on the ontological and narrative structures - "system stories" - built in to their architecture.
Media: Academic paper
Credit: https://mtchl.net/system-stories-model-worlds/

Description: This text provided the context concerning the cultural and critical aspects of computational generative art in the 2000's. My face painter artwork and other website based artworks operate in this domain where procedural and programmatic methods give rise to generative outcomes with cultural and critical concerns.

Reference: TOYA008
Title: Web Programming Languages and Software
Date: NA
Author: NA
Details: One thing the most visited websites have in common that they are dynamic websites. Their development typically involves server-side coding, client-side coding and database technology. The programming languages applied to deliver similar dynamic web content however vary vastly between various sites. Software is a collection of instructions and data that tell a computer how to work.
Media: Web Languages and Software
Credit: wikipedia.org/Programming_languages and wikipedia.org/Software

Description: I use software including Max/MSP/Jitter, After Effects, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro 5 and RunwayML. Broadly the above tools are all computational mediums. My work often deals with computation and visuality where I use image manipulation, video, creative programming, the Internet, and machine learning-based computer vision models.

Max/MSP/Jitter -- is used for making real-time image manipulation methods. Also used for generating the 3D paint animation used for prototyping the tools of Paint Your Face Away (both the workshop tool and online application).

After Effects, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro 5 - are used for video/image editing broadly.

RunwayML, face-api.js, ml5.js, Python code provided by a collaborator Ashwin D’Cruz -- are used for using computer vision models - for instance for face detection models used for the workshop and online application of Paint Your Face Away.

Web programming languages such as Javascript, CSS, PHP, with libraries including P5.js and jQuery. -- are for building website based artworks and outcomes - for instance, the online application of Paint Your Face Away.

Reference: TOYA011
Title: Acrylic Paint
Date: NA
Author: NA
Details: Acrylic paint is a fast-drying paint made of pigment suspended in acrylic polymer emulsion and plasticisers, silicon oils, defoamers, stabilisers, or metal soaps.
Media: Stationary
Credit: wikipedia.org/Acrylic_paint

Description: Back in around 2013-2014, I often used acrylic paint to make hundreds of small paintings on paper, and the painted images were later digitised with the scanner and used for my new media artworks.

Reference: TOYA014
Title: Scanner
Date: NA
Author: NA
Details: An image scanner—often abbreviated to just scanner, is a device that optically scans images, printed text, handwriting or an object and converts it to a digital image.
Media: Scanner
Credit: wikipedia.org/Image_scanner

Description: Back in around 2013-2014, I often used acrylic paint to make hundreds of small paintings on paper, and the painted images were later digitised with the scanner and used for my new media artworks.

Reference: TOYA015
Title: My Computer and It's Screen
Date: 2013
Author: Shinji Toya
Details: Photograph of artist's computer
Media: Hardware
Credit: Courtesy of the artist

Description: The object suggests the computational operation and potential that one artist can exploit to create various creative outcomes in our time. The screen is symbolic of - what interfaces can do to mediate the process of researching, creating, socially connecting, but also presenting work on screen-based media. This potential in itself is creative inspiration for me.