No Selfie

This archive is a “bestiary of errors” found among the portraits of faces created by a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) that has “learned” to create images of human faces by studying millions of images uploaded to Flickr.com. These point to a new kind of aesthetic — the generative error — distinct from glitch, in which images are distorted after the fact, these images are glitched in their generation through the AI’s misinterpretation of patterns. Common outliers such as hands on a face, a baby’s pacifier, elaborate hairdos, shadows, or motion blur, become something startling and strange in comparison to the most detailed renderings of faces that are otherwise created by the AI.