Bushwalking, is a video generated with a StyleGAN2 trained on the material of Yuri Bolotin's bushwalks in the Blue Mountains area in New South Wales, Australia. The work was created duting my residency at BigCi, Bilpin, NSW, Australia.

Anticipating 2020s, is a video generated with the algorithmic rearrangement of found footage, based on the output of an object detection algorithm, to portray our collective imagination about life in the 2020s from the perspective of decades-earlier science fiction films and books.

Forging Emotions, explores the use of visual emotion datasets and the working processes of GANs for visual affect generation, i.e., to generate images that can convey or trigger specified emotions. The work relates to the recently adopted art-historical term of Techspressionism to describe art created using digital technology to convey subjective, emotional content. The images of this work were created with the use of a Deep Convolutional GAN (DCGAN). For the training of the GAN new image datasets were created by collecting Instagram images with the hashtags #sad and #happy.

The work was created based on the body of research published in A. Foka, Forging Emotions: A Deep Learning Experiment on Emotions and Art, In Proceedings of the 27th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Barcelona 10-16 June 2022.

It has been presented in Technarte 2020 Art & Technology International Conference, 12-13 November 2020, Los Angeles/Online.

Breaking the Silence is presented as a news website that highlights and brings to focus contemporary taboo topics. The articles were generated using automatic text summarization techniques. Initially, news articles that contain the word taboo and thus include overt references to contemporary taboo topics in today’s press, as well as the report of transgressions, were mined from various online sources. The mined articles are then grouped into topics using Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods and correspond to identified taboos. The generated articles on “Breaking the Silence” underline the different taboos discussed at different times and the arguments for their creation, maintenance, or destruction.

It has been presented as a net-based artwork in the 19th Media Art Biennale WRO 2021 REVERSO. DEPENDENT PLACES exhibition, Oct 1-28, 2021. WRO Art Center.

The work was created based on the body of research published in A. Foka, Breaking the Silence: Machine Learning Identified Taboos, Interdisciplinary Conference Taboo – Transgression – Transcendence in Art & Science (TTT20), 26-28 November 2020, University of Applied Arts Vienna/Online.

The Invisible Structures of the Artworld draws inspiration from the contemporary artworld processes through which artists and artworks are appreciated and gain recognition as well as the fact that the artworld structure at any given time is not entirely known. Another point from which this work draws inspiration is the approaches taken for social network analysis, the process of investigating social structures through the use of networks. The Invisible Structures of the Artworld is a data-driven work. It collects real-time social media data to identify artworld actors and finally visualize an artworld network whose structure becomes visible. Thus, it visualizes the global transformations of the contemporary artworld as well as the role and impact of artworld actors involved in the processes of the production and mediation of art.

It has been presented as a video in the ACM ARTECH 2019 exhibition and as a net-based artwork in the publication at Leonardo (MIT) 2022.

The work was created based on the body of research published in various academic journals and conferences:

A. Foka, Constructing an Artworld Influencers Network by Mining Social Media, Leonardo (MIT Press) 2022; 55 (1): 24–29.

A. Foka, The Invisible Structures of the Artworld. In Proceedings of Artech 2019, 9th International Conference on Digital and Interactive Arts (ARTECH 2019), October 23–25, 2019, Braga, Portugal, 2019.

A.Foka, Social Media Mining for the Analysis of the Artworld, 107th College Art Association of America (CAA) Annual Conference, Art and Artificial Intelligence Session, New York, USA, 13-16 February 2019.

A. Foka, An artist ranking system based on social media mining, Information Retrieval Journal, Vol. 21, Issue 5, pp 410-448, 2018

http://www.amaliafoka.com/artworld-network/