Unpublished: Sami Lukkarinen in conversation with Roope Mokka and Jaakko Lehtinen

Unpublished: Sami Lukkarinen in conversation with Roope Mokka and Jaakko Lehtinen
Moderated by curator Anna Mustonen
Wednesday 19th April 17.30-19.00

Galerie Forsblom is delighted to announce a conversation between artist Sami Lukkarinen, artist-researcher Roope Mokka, and professor Jaakko Lehtinen from Aalto University.
 

Selfies are the most taken type of photograph in the world. Yet, the majority of selfies remain seen only by the taker themselves, with only a fraction posted online. The estimated number of selfies taken per day ranges from hundreds of millions to even billions, but most importantly, a selfie is always defined by publicity – it is either shared or not shared.

Unpublished is a long-term project by artists Roope Mokka and Sami Lukkarinen that invites volunteers to curate and donate a self-portrait they have taken - but not shared - using different AI tools to give them a new life. Unpublished has collected some 3000 selfies so far.
 

The conversation will focus on the use of AI tools in connection with Lukkarinen’s current exhibition Borderland at Galerie Forsblom, with a particular focus on StyleGAN technology that the artist has used to generate the images that then become paintings. The artworks in Borderland are based on images from both the Unpublished-series and images of the collection at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art generated through an AI algorithm.

Sami Lukkarinen is a visual artist that has been using online imagery as the source of his art for decades and started painting selfies in 2003, well before there was a word for it.

Roope Mokka is an artist-researcher that has studied the intersection of society and technology since the late nineties and is the founder of the think tank Demos Helsinki.

Jaakko Lehtinen is a professor at Aalto University with a focus on image-producing Artificial Intelligence and computer graphics. Lehtinen is also a principal research scientist at NVIDIA Research, the company behind the StyleGAN technology widely used by visual and media artists for image generation

The gallery will also arrange an opportunity to become part of the Unpublished series through two-weekend events where the artist will be present to collect the selfies from the visitors.

Saturday 15th April 13.00-15.00

Saturday 22nd April 13.00-15.00