Ice Machine
Ice Machine is a video projection made using a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). GANs are algorithmic architectures that use two neural networks, pitting one against the other in order to generate new, synthetic images. Using search terms like “blue ice” and “iceberg”, Levesque first created a database of images scraped from the online public domain and then trained the GAN model to generate new images of ice. The video composites these synthetic images together. This piece invites audiences to consider how the formation of assumptions about the changing Arctic are based upon the contemporaneous projection of (mediated) images based upon the digital creation of new ice. Given the ineffective and tedious redundancy encoded in representations of the most-easily-accessible and distributed tropes of melting ice and an increasingly burning and sweltering Arctic, what types of syntactic and contextual formations can be created to produce meaningful responses to climate change?
American interdisciplinary artist Justin Levesque earned his BFA in Photography from the University of Southern Maine.
Levesque has exhibited throughout New England including the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; nationally at Terrault Contemporary, Baltimore, MD; JanKossen Contemporary, New York City; and internationally at Shape Arts, London, UK; and The Factory, Djúpavík, Iceland.
‘The internet is blue’, Levesque tells us. ‘From hyperlinks on hardcoded web pages to more than thirty percent of all corporate logos circulating online, blue defines the internet’s pathways and represents its vital signs. In the world of images, the colour signals wealth, the divine, and the nebulous promises of technology.
I make art about the slippery relationship between images and objects by using content sourced from North Atlantic and Polar ecologies, heroic myths, dynamic systems, ice, and the internet’s obsession with all things blue. My image-based, sculptural, and site-specific projects visualise tech-centred shifts in contemporary cultural paradigms – landing in a continuum between IRL and the virtual.
The generated works consider the materiality and tradition of formal photography in relationship to information exchange and mediated geographies. Together the projects form a visual network encoded with concepts specific to media culture – the proliferation and consumption of images online, social feedback, gratuitous thoughts and prayers, and the development of picture-making on the internet.’