Timothy Thomasson
(2022)
Generative (infinite duration)
Real-time, computer generated video
Variant , Looping screen capture video
“‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ is a real-time, procedurally generated installation work that questions our relationships to image, geography, and mass data collection systems. To create the work, a historically and geographically ambiguous 3D virtual landscape is populated with figures collected from Google Street View. These figures are processed through a deep neural network, so they become three-dimensional in the virtual space. Thousands of these figures taken from all over the world are selected randomly in real-time to inhabit the landscape. With their blurred faces from ‘Street View’ these people become semi-anonymized entities pulled from the approximately 115 thousand terabytes of 360 degree image data collected by Google– many of whom would not have known their photo was ever taken in the first place (never mind ending up in this new strange setting). The image of each individual’s body is processed further, pushing these figures deeper into a digital obscurity, stripping them of their marks of individuality and place, and re-situating them in new, strange and ambiguous contexts.