Human Trials by Rashed Haq

Assembly presents "Human Trials" by Rashed Haq, a collection of portraits of people who do not exist, created between 2016-2020, using an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm. We live in a world of ubiquitous networked communication and generate a tremendous amount of data as many of our interactions are digitized. Algorithms sift through this data to make sense of who we are, and assign to us a gender, ethnicity, age, education level, class, marital status, entertainment and shopping preferences, and even identification as a terrorist. This invisible system shapes our lives, often without us knowing. These can come in the form of recommendation engines or decision engines. AI often generates distorted views of their subjects as the underlying data can be incomplete, inaccurate, or biased. This collection of portraits visualizes this distortion by retraining the AI on a set of the artist’s original photographs produced in his studio, and inserting “bad” data in the training data set.