All I See is a Sixpack

By Ola Rubik

We step into a great time of gender awareness and fluidity, but the internet is still full of harmful stereotypes and misleading visions of masculinity and femininity. Concepts such as alpha males or bimbo females are still rapidly reproduced and misunderstood.

In the extreme growth of image-sharing platforms, Ola Rubik investigates how representative images flow through Instagram as AI algorithms learn and codify such binary representation by generating new images based on misleading portrayals and limited machine vision.

All I See is a Sixpack is a visual study in dealing with stereotypes, genderfication of the body, expectations and sexual prejudice. The work researches this digital image waste ecology — with its embedded toxicity — and translates its universal harm through image juxtaposition and analogue manipulation into wearable objects that serve to dissolve the extremes of gender binary into a more fluid spectrum — full of colors, shapes, emotions and explorations.

All I see is six pack All I see is pink All I see is you

Research

Data comes from Instagram platform, which is the most direct in sharing images. There are more than 443 000 000 mln posts with hashtag #selfie there. I wanted to dive into that, at the same time narrowing such a broad topic to more specific. First it was only selfies of man, particularly from the alpha male subhashtag. Later on as it became more interesting to me how the extremes would behave I used also the fem analog - bimbo female.

AI as a lens

AI is becoming an archeological tool to dig into layers of information in order to find clues - and in the end to write a particular personal history. Like from a piece of vase buried in sand you can read as so much as what the whole generation was about - the same with this images you can read a story of me, a member of todays generation.

AI is also a clueless things. It learns while you feed it with information. It is recreating what it sees not what it assumes.

Sources

[1] Russel, Legacy (2020) Glitch Feminism. Verso Books.

[2] Rafman, Jon (2015) Oh, the Humanity! YouTube. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KL8I5-mJqw (accessed 24 May 2021)

[3] Kore, Chris (2019) Aimnesia. Available at http://www.aimnesia.com/about (accessed 24 May 2021)

Data

First data wanted to be downloaded by data scraping but as there were also a lot of problems with that images were collected by hand.

First I started to morph only images of one position, and separately another. The program I used as tool is Playform. The images became more than just some pixels - they became little morphs, each starting it's life with a new energy. Ready to tell their story. Can they talk

If we push back and non perform - we make a glitch.

Then after mixing both collections I was satisfied with my little morphs and took a step forward to display them properly.

Next steps

It bacame pretty magical connection to me with the idea how plastic is forming. I used this material and hot, vacuum shaping tool to create some kind of shields. Firstly I worked with clay to produce molds. Later on I tried various techniques of putting pictures on it. To seamlessly smooth out the edges of paper I worked with airbrush.