Smith’s work has been shown nationally and internationally at the Tucson Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, Arizona, Split Videoart Festival in Croatia, CICA Museum in South Korea and BIOs in Athens, Greece. She was longlisted for the 2021 Lumen Prize in Art and Technology (London), presented at Technarte Conference (Bilbao), selected as Art Connect’s June Artist to Watch, and received the College Art Association’s Services to Artists Committee Award for her video Lights Out. She has also been featured in PDNedu and Al-Tiba9 Magazine (Barcelona).
Kaitlyn Jo Smith
Lights Out
Video, AI-generated faces
"In ‘Lights Out,’ I utilize machine learning to render visible the intangible state of America's labor force. The term ‘lights out manufacturing’ refers to a fully automated factory that requires no human presence on site, operating without heating, air conditioning, lunch breaks, or unions. Similarly, the portraits in ‘Lights Out’ are not of real people; rather, they are deepfakes created by artificial intelligence using a neural network. This neural network was trained using a dataset of 50,000 pictures of factory workers that I sourced through Facebook.
I empower the machine to visualize those it has replaced by employing these found identities to teach the algorithm to see, interpret, and render out its own assembly of laborers. As the neural network is fed more portraits to analyze, its deep fakes become more believable, resulting in a new labor force of 60,000 - one worker for each factory shuttered since 2000. The AI-generated faces have been meticulously organized into columns that slowly shift up and down the gallery wall. The monotonous, machine-like rhythm created by this vertical assembly line mimics that of a conveyor belt, symbolically placing the portraits in dialogue with capitalist commodities."
— Kaitlyn Smith
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Duration: 0:05:00
About the artist
Kaitlyn Jo Smith
Smith’s work has been shown nationally and internationally at the Tucson Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, Arizona, Split Videoart Festival in Croatia, CICA Museum in South Korea and BIOs in Athens, Greece. She was longlisted for the 2021 Lumen Prize in Art and Technology (London), presented at Technarte Conference (Bilbao), selected as Art Connect’s June Artist to Watch, and received the College Art Association’s Services to Artists Committee Award for her video Lights Out. She has also been featured in PDNedu and Al-Tiba9 Magazine (Barcelona).
