Privacy, data protection, and governance of the neural network
Removing donated photos
Artist bios
Contact
Pictures
Welcome to Unpublished, a collaborative art project exploring humanity's uncharted side. We're a team of artists who believe that everyone has a unique perspective. One that they don't usually share with others, but nevertheless is a part of human condition.
Here's how it works: We're asking people from all walks of life to donate an unpublished selfie, which will remain private. It can be a photo that you took for yourself but never shared with anyone else. It can be a photo that you're proud of or one that makes you a little bit uncomfortable. Whatever the case may be, we want to collect them!
Once you have donated the photo – like nearly 4000 people already have – we will use a neural network to generate new images that are not just copies of the images that the network was trained on, but new, unique images that reflect the style of the training images. These images will be presented in an art exhibition in various mediums such as oil paintings, prints, media art, and interactive installations.
We believe that this project has the potential to create a new model for living and engaging with intelligent machines, by allowing the donors to participate in the process of image generation actively, we aim to create a more collaborative, democratic, and transparent relationship between humans and machines that learn.
By participating in this project, you'll be part of a collective exploration into the uncharted side of humanity, where your images will contribute to the understanding of the human condition.
We respect the privacy of our donors and the images will remain private. Only a neural network sees them. We give each donor a unique code that enables you to delete your photo from the archive. Our next step will be to give you more power over the use of the neural network, in other words, to experiment with its governance. The resulting AI will only be used for art and for nothing else.
Thank you for considering donating to our project.
Exhibitions
NAAMIOT - MASKS, Serlachius Museum Kartano, Mänttä, Finland, May 11 - September 15 2024
Finlayson Art Area, Tampere, Finland, June 15 - August 31, 2023
Instituto Iberoamericano de Finlandia, Madrid, Spain, February 21 - March 10, 2023
MyData Summit, Finland, Helsinki, September 5-7, 2022
Untitled Festival, Online and Helsinki, Finland, September 23-23, 2021
XXV Mänttä Art Festival, Mänttä, Finland June 13 - August 31, 2021
Kunsthalle Turku, Turku, Finland September 3 - October 3, 2021
Backlight touring exhibition, Ylöjarvi, Inari, Orivesi, Finland, 2020-2021
Backlight 2020 – Related Realities, Tampere, Finland September 5 - November 1, 2020
Privacy, data protection, and governance of the neural network
The Untitled project does not collect any other personal data besides pictures. The pictures can not be linked to any personal data, nor any other data that can be used to identify you personally.
Privacy, data protection, and anonymity are the key characteristics of the project. All images collected in the project exhibitions and website are processed in such a way that it is impossible to identify the donors. All processing is done by artificial intelligence, i.e. no one sees the handed-over images, they are only machine-read. The generated pictures bear no resemblance to the donated photos nor do they have any other recognisable features.
The collected images are sent via a secure connection to Digital Ocean's data center in Frankfurt. After processing, the original image remains in a secure database that can only be accessed with the permission of the sender of the image. Individual images can be deleted by sending a request for deletion with a randomly generated unique code to the address unpublished.foundation@gmail.com. When deleting pictures, the pictures are not visible to the person deleting them. No metadata is stored about the photos.
The new images created by the neural network are only used as art. Since the created new images are based on thousands of images, the features of a single new image cannot be tracked back to the teaching material, so that they would be recognisable. Published artwork is also manually reviewed to ensure that any names, other private information, or identifiable characteristics that could theoretically appear in the final AI-generated images are removed.
The image archive can only be handed over to a museum or archive if the custodian of the archive undertakes to keep them private as mentioned above. During the project, the possibility of performing the above-described protection cryptographically in the manner described above is being investigated. If no final location for the archive is found, the archive will be destroyed at the end of the project. The accountable registrar is currently Roope Mokka.
The purpose of the project is not only to realize the body of work, but also to create a plan and understanding of how the project's digital art, which is based on the participation of thousands of people, can function in such a way that psychological safety and the opportunity for cooperation are realized, and both people outside social media and cultural institutions, as well as minorities, need support and people in a vulnerable social position can participate in it.
Our aim is to give each donor maximum power over the use of the neural network created as well as share any new tools for artmaking with the community of donors.
Removing donated photos
If you feel that you do not after all want to donate you photo to the project, images can be removed. This is how it works: simply send the unique code that you got after uploading the photo to the address unpublished.foundation@gmail.com
Team Bios
Sami Lukkarinen is a visual artist that has been using online imagery as the source of his for twenty years and started painting selfies in 2003, well before there was a word for it.
Lukkarinen is best known for his pixel portraits painted with oil colors. Lukkarinen has been using online imagery as the source of his art for decades and started painting selfies in 2003, well before there was a word for it.
Sami Lukkarinen has studied the relationship between digital images and painting in his art for over twenty years. The self-portraits/selfies found on the Internet, social media and the image space of artificial intelligence have been the starting point of his artistic work since 2003. The impact of technology on the portrait and especially self-portrait tradition and thus way we construct a self-image is the core of his art. Lukkarinen's works have been exhibited in dozens of art exhibitions in Finland and abroad. His paintings are in all the most important art collections in Finland as well as in discerning collections in Sweden and Germany, He has graduated from the Department of time and space arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki with a master's degree in fine art in 2001.
Roope Mokka has investigated and intervened in social, economic and technological issues for twenty years as an artist, urbanist, and futures researcher. His work focuses primarily on large-scale social transition, especially decarbonisation and digitalisation. Mokka is best known as the founder of the think tank Demos Helsinki.
Mokka’s art embodies ethics, conflicts, and imaginaries, using a critical and proactive approach. Employing a range of formats and strategies, including performance, public interventions, institutional experimentalism, activism, media art, underground events, and workshops, Mokka’s work fosters public imagination, collective action, and critical thinking.
Mokka experiments with possible and impossible futures, using performative, conceptual, social, mixed media, and digital art methods. He is part of the art group Unpublished (founded with painter Sami Lukkarinen in 2019) and Bodytalk dance group (founded with dancer Simo Vassinen and choreographer Maria F Scaroni in 2020). He has been active in the underground rave and club world as a dancer, organiser, and DJ from the mid-’90s onwards, participating in several party collectives in Finland and the UK. Mokka’s work has been presented by leading Finnish art institutions and festivals such as the Museum of Contemporary Arts Kiasma, Mänttä Art Festival, International Photo Triennale Backlight, Kunsthalle Turku, Helsinki Festival, and Burning Man. He is also the founder and curator of the festival Untitled.
Mikko Kalsi is an IT systems specialist and manages the software development of Unpublished. He is also an integral part of the artistic work, developing software for collecting and archiving photos, training the neural networks, and creating code for exhibitions and the web. Mikko has over 20 years of experience in developing software for public and private sectors, from large organisations to startups.
Contact
Roope Mokka roope.mokka@gmail.com Tel +358440400413
Sami Lukkarinen lukkarinensami@hotmail.com Tel +358503019276
Instagram @unpublished.us
Updated 14.6.2021