Jacky is an engineer, new media artist and researcher. He got his beginnings as an AI researcher at UC Berkeley and has been handcrafting AI art models since 2018. His work involves the blend of traditional artwork and computed media.
His project for Picture Pixels was built with Touchdesigner and real-time AI, with an Xbox Kinect for handling motion tracking. Ideally, the visuals will be projected on a dark wall, or else a display. Standing far away, the screen will appear entirely dark, but moving closer to the scene and moving your arms will cause the scene to ‘light’, with the scene getting brighter the closer the viewer is to the screen. The visuals will resemble nature scenery, where the sun’s placement and size overhead will depend on the viewer’s movement and their proximity to the screen — however, the nature scenery will be covered with a speckled frosted glass texture, that will similarly become more and more opaque the closer the viewer is to the screen. The project is meant to be a rumination on the proximity of digital worlds, the idea that we’re able to construct entire universes in digital space, yet no matter how hard we try, we’re unable to fully inhabit them.
