Humans & Screens

It all started with some thoughts: what does the screen mean to humans, what has it become, and what is it to us more than just a black mirror when turned off?

As children, we often heard the elderly comment on the way we watched TV. "Don’t sit too close to the TV, you’ll get square eyes," my grandfather used to say. Back then, he most probably didn’t understand how right he actually was. Well, not literally, but symbolically.

Today, most of us don’t go anywhere without bringing a screen. It sits in a tiny pocket on the arm when we run, we stare into it like a window when we work, and it lies close to our heads on the bedside table when we sleep; waiting for us to read all our missed notifications, which is exactly what we do less than a minute after waking up. With today’s technology, we even have a screen to be guided by right in front of us when driving our cars.

The screen hasn’t only become a tool for everyday things in our lives. It has become our third arm and a sixth sense. We’ve made the screen a part of the human body and designed our lives around it.

Humans and Screens is an art project developed using AI, short for artificial intelligence. This AI in particular is based on a generative adversarial network, whish is a sort of machine learning (ML). This AI has been reading datasets consisting of images of screens and people. Based on the collected information the algorithm behind the AI has generated illustrations showing the relationship between the two parties.

This collection of images is the result.