Procedural computer-generated video.
‘I'm Feeling Lucky’ is a real-time, computer generated video that questions our relationships to image, geography, virtual space, and mass data collection systems. On screen, a historically and geographically ambiguous 3D virtual landscape is generated and populated with figures collected from Google Street View. These figures are processed through a deep neural network, so they become three-dimensional in the virtual space. Thousands of these figures taken from all over the world are selected randomly to inhabit the landscape.
With their blurred faces from ‘Street View’ these figures become semi-anonymised entities pulled from the approximately 115 thousand terabytes of 360 degree image data collected by Google– many of whom would not have known their photo was ever taken in the first place (never mind ending up in this new strange setting). The image of each individual's body is processed further... pushing these figures deeper into a digital obscurity, stripping them of their marks of individuality and place, and re-situating them in new, strange and ambiguous contexts.
The work takes into consideration panorama paintings of the late 19th century as objects of historical, cultural, and perceptual significance, and situates them within contemporary media contexts. Panoramas are structures in which large 360 degree paintings depict battle scenes, religious events, or large cityscapes. With ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’, the notion of the panorama painting is brought to virtual space. The landscape is generated procedurally, so the panoramic image is continual as the virtual camera rotates around the landscape endlessly.