[ISEA2019] Artists Statement: Ana Jofre, Kathleen Brennan & Vincent Berardi — Deconstructing and reconstructing a periodical archive by tracking, tagging, and extracting images of faces

Artists Statement

Keywords: Culture Analytics, Image analysis, Data visualization, Data mining archives

This talk presents progress in an ongoing data-mining and visualization project exploring the archives of Time magazine. Our goals are to extract and re-contextualize images of faces (along with their associated metadata) from the entire Time magazine archive (dating back to 1923), and to create public-facing web-based visualizations (as well as interactive VR and AR installations) that display our results and invite viewers to explore how representations of human faces have changed over time within the archive. This work combines work in machine learning, data analytics, interactive design, and the humanities, bringing together researchers from across disciplines. A parallel project objective is to develop an interdisciplinary methodology for systematically deconstructing any periodical image archive.

  • Ana Jofre obtained her PhD in Physics from the University of Toronto, Canada, did Post-doctoral work at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) in Gaithersburg Maryland, USA, and taught -and did research – at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte (USA) for six years before transitioning her career towards the arts. She then completed her MFA at OCAD University in Toronto, then worked as a research fellow in the Visual Analytics Lab at OCAD University, and at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics Culture Analytics program at UCLA in Los Angeles, California. Her publications and conference presentations cover a wide range of intellectual interests, from physics to critical theory, and she has exhibited her artwork internationally. Her creative and research interests include figurative sculpture, interactive new media, internet art, human-computer interaction, and data visualization. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Creative Arts and Technology at SUNY Polytechnic, in Utica NY.
  • Kathleen Brennan, SUNY Polytechnic Institute, Utica, New York, USA
  • Vincent Berardi, Chapman University, Orange, California, USA