There is always more in us.
Unpublished Us is an experimental long term art project, to establish a safe and privacy-preserving archive of unpublished self-images. It aims to document and archive the sides of humanity that are not subject to publicity.
As such it is also an invitation to see yourself differently, to open yourself to the possibility that perhaps instead of being something you could be everything, instead of trying to find out and define what you are, you could be infinite.
The purpose of Unpublished Us is to collect, document and bring to public human expressions that would remain unpublished and -documented. This is possible through recent developments in computation. Machine intelligence has gained the ability to create new faces of people, in essence, selfies of people that do not exist. The faces are produced by an algorithm “looking” at thousands of selfies, eventually learning to create its own hyper-realistic pictures of artificial humans. The collected unpublished selfies are seen by no-one but the computer software that “looks at them” and tries to create entirely new faces out of them.
Unpublished Us consists of a privacy-first designed database of unpublished selfies, a safe space, and ritual for submitting private self-images, an algorithm generating new images based on them and a series of exhibitions of the images and the process itself.
PRIVACY
If you use this website, no personal data will be collected. We only collect images that are not linked to any personal information. Personal information is any data with which you could be personally identified. This privacy policy explains what information we collect and what we use it for. It also explains how and for what purpose this happens.
Privacy and anonymization of data is a core function of the artwork. All the images collected by the website are processed in a way that it is impossible to identify an individual.
Collected images are sent over a secure connection to Digital Oceans's data center in Frankfurt in Germany. After processing, the original image will remain in a safe database, that can be only accessed by the permission of the picture sender. Individual images can be deleted by sending a request to delete with the randomly generated unique code to unpublished.foundation@gmail.com
No metadata is kept about photos. When there are a significant amount (3000’s) of photos, we will start teaching a neural network with the unpublished selfies. In this process, only the algorithm will see your photos. The new images it creates based on them will be only used as art. The published artwork will also be reviewed manually to ensure that any names and other private information in the final output is removed.
By submitting an image on this website you accept the storing and processing of your images as mentioned above-mentioned procession of archiving and art making.
ARTISTS
Unpublished Us is initiated by Sami Lukkarinen and Roope Mokka and It is produced in collaboration with cultural institutions and experts in technology, spatial design, and spiritual practice.
Sami Lukkarinen is an artist that has been painting internet published self-portraits since 2004. His paintings are collected by private collectors and museums alike and exhibited regularly.
Roope Mokka is a futurist specialising in the connection between social fabric and technology machine for nearly two and a half decades. He is the founder of the think tank Demos Helsinki.
Mikko Kalsi is a IT systems specialist. He manages software development in this project.
EXHIBITIONS
XXV Mänttä Art Festival, Finland June 13 to August 31, 2021Kunsthalle Turku, Finland September 3 to October 3, 2021 Backlight 2020 – Related Realities, Tampere, Finland, 2020
CONTACT
Roope Mokka roope.mokka@gmail.com Tel +358440400413Sami Lukkarinen lukkarinensami@hotmail.com Tel +358503019276Instagram @unpublished.us
Updated 14.6.2021