Art & AI.
Rachel was commissioned by Experiments with Google and Nord Projects as an Artist to develop Mood Board Search, a tool using Concept Activation Vectors (CAVs) to power more nuanced visual search. Employing CAV Camera—an Android app connecting Mood Board Search with a Pixel camera (running on Android 9 or above)—users can ‘try on’ Rachel’s concept ‘Fractured’ for a new way of seeing. Mood Board Search won Best in Category: Expressing in the 2023 IxDA Interaction Awards.
Exploring intuitive applications of AI, the commission came out of Rachel’s longstanding interest in honing computer vision for surfacing artworks with a deep resonance for the human viewer. Before the Google project, Rachel was Co-founder with Dan Ballin of museme, an online platform for artwork discovery through machine learning.
Read more about the machine learning approach, Concept Activation Vectors (CAVs), underpinning the project here.
Sound.
For Artcan’s Holy Fluff stand at Stockholm’s artist-run fair, SUPERMARKET, 26-29 May 2022, Rachel contributed a sound collage about healing. The seed of the work was planted inside of an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine. Rachel had a brain scan to look for acoustic neuromas, after her sense of hearing was mysteriously altered.
The fMRI scan produces loud pulsating sounds which are caused by metal coils, or gradient coils in the machine, receiving electrical stimuli and generating a magnetic field. The sounds are also affected by system-related instabilities, subject motion and physiological fluctuations. Over the 20-minute duration of the scan, they go from jarring to trance-like, inducing an almost meditative state.
Rachel has a novel underway in which the lead character encounters Walter de Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977), an interior earth sculpture in which 191 cubic metres of earth cover 335 square meters of floor space on the second story of a building on Wooster Street in New York. This re-contextualised earth—a habitat for dragonflies and mushrooms in the middle of the City—softens the corners of the room like a colour field painting and produces a revitalising effect that is reflected on in the writing, an excerpt of which can be heard in the sound collage. The real and imagined sounds which the speaker describes—seedlings popping, the respiration of a truck—are echoed in the fMRI samples also folded into the collage.
The novel experiments with a musical substructure which stems from the protagonist’s study of music theory, imposed as an interpretive framework upon new or inexplicable situations. For example, the Brahms Ballads, No.s 1-4, op. 10 factor in both formally and thematically. The No. 4 Ballad can be broken up into sections, one of which underlies The Earth Room passage, corresponding because of its lush chordal texture, grounding the listener after a highly chromatic and harmonically complex section. A recording of this section of the Ballad, as well as loops cut from the same piece of legato piano music—and the voice of a little boy narrating a fantastical Romantic story—contrast the staccato fMRI sounds heard in the Holy Fluff work.
For ArtCan’s Fabrication of Self stand at Stockholm’s artist-run fair, SUPERMARKET, 14-17 October 2021, Rachel conceived a sound collage paying homage to early pioneers and sub-genres of electronic music including musique concrète treating sound as material. Her process involved the layering and looping of sounds deriving mostly from ‘found’ household objects repurposed as instruments as well as her own voice and those of family members. The work celebrates the words of Debussy: ‘There is no theory. You have merely to listen. Pleasure is the law.’
Viewers were invited to listen with headphones via a QR code at the stand, and the work was broadcast over Lumpen Station at 15h30 every day of the fair.