I designed two augmented reality installations for the exhibition Orphaned Images at Norrköping City Museum. The exhibition is curated by Konstantin Economou and aims to provoke discussion about the place of old and new images in our lives in terms of viewing practices, ownership, and production techniques. The installations present AI-generated human portraits from Phillip Wang’s website This Person Does Not Exist and invite visitors to view these synthetised faces, sometimes alongside old photos depicting real humans, through a combination of different technologies: a slide projector, light table, and mobile devices. The work aims to trigger reflections on what pictures, authenticity and physicality mean to us.

We would like to thank Phillip Wang for his collaboration and generosity. We collected the AI-generated images from his website: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/.

The technique, StyleGAN, Phillip used to generate these images was developed by Nvidia
(TM) researchers Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, and Timo Aila. Link to the paper:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04948 .

We used Unity ( https://unity3d.com ) and the Vuforia Engine
( https://engine.vuforia.com/engine ) to implement the installations.

To generate the augmented reality markers we used the utility ARMaker created by Shawn
Lehner: https://shawnlehner.github.io/ARMaker/ .

Installation texts
Permanent for a while – Slide Projector
Permanent for a while – Light table

Videos

Images