Essay: Libby Heaney: FIGURES, £igur€$, go figure?! (Exclusivo Swapcard)

Libby Heaney presents a new video essay as part of Amplify 2020, a residency connecting and empowering an active network of women-identifying artists and professionals working in the digital arts.

FIGURES, £igur€$, go figure? is a video essay centred around Heaney’s forthcoming artwork Figures in Limbo, a partially playable 3D animation, exploring representations of the body in computer vision and datasets and parallels in (mostly western) art history.

The piece investigates how cultural and historical biases are now being translated into code and what this means. The artwork’s narrative is initially composed by an AI weaving together descriptions of so-called canonical artworks such as Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man with text from academic papers on AI pose estimation, highlighting the continued search for the ideal body. The AI-composed narrative is then playfully deconstructed by Heaney to open up space for other possibilities, as alternative bodies emerge, boundaryless and formless, evading the gaze of computer vision.