Simone C. Niquille (CH, 1987)
Residency period: February – March 2020
My time at La Becque was cut short due to Covid-19. Unfortunately, I only ended up spending roughly three weeks there.
* Elephant Juice
I was able to continue some work on the animation Elephant Juice. The work was commissioned by HeK Basel and MU Eindhoven for their exhibition Real Feelings. The exhibition was scheduled to open at the end of May 2020 but ultimately was rescheduled for August 2020. I arrived at La Becque with a written script and half the 3D models finished. I planned to model, animate and render Elephant Juice while at La Becque. Instead, I ended up finishing the work in the chaotic uncertainty that was the spring/summer of 2020. The work deals with emotion recognition software as it is used for the recruitment process, effectively replacing human recruiters with a screen and web camera. A perfect environment for Zoom…
* Model Behaviour
During my time at La Becque I taught the “Model Behaviour” course on computer vision training datasets at ECAL for the MA in Photography programme. The course raised the question “why datasets? Are they not boring and huge?” In machine learning, datasets are assembled to create models of reality. The course focused on image datasets as they are used to train computer vision. By investigating the content of various datasets we experimented with strategies to change their model of reality while spending time on the individual images, something the dataset was not intended for, yet which entirely changes the experience of images as data. — Simone C. Niquille
Simone C Niquille is a Swiss designer and researcher based in Amsterdam. Her practice Technoflesh investigates the representation of identity & the digitisation of biomass in the networked space of appearance.