Moved by Color With Cyril Diagne

As an artist and instructor, my first mission is to stay home, stay informed, and help where I can. I'm inspired by the artist Sougwen Chung who asks on Twitter: "How can we create and nurture spaces of care, exploration and sanctuary without physical proximity?" It is hard to find the same relevance in the work we were doing yesterday. It's easy to put everything in life in front of creating new, risky, work. But when time gets slow, and duties get fuzzy, it becomes easier to experiment with something new. The infamous "rainy days" have now become "confinement weeks." I'm sure we'll see some very powerful creative work coming out of these otherwise tragic weeks.

The only real advice I could give is rather mundane but critical: to stop using your laptop on the couch. It may sound silly, but I've repeated that all week last week to my students. I've had acute tendinitis on my shoulders for years now because of unreasoned use of laptops and trackpads in bed or on the couch. Working at a desk, with an ergonomic mouse and standing up at least every hour is what gives my body a breath of fresh air. Another positive note is that I'm now regularly doing "online apéro" with friends I was losing touch with—I hope that will stay after confinement.

I was born and raised near Avignon, which is famous for having a vibrant festival of theatre, and an art scene that’s reminiscent of the era of Picasso and impressionists who spent a long time there. The art that I’ve been around physically has always been very colorful and bright. My father is Senagalese, he was born in Dakar, and he moved to France when he was 20 years old. Early on, he showed me the aesthetics—the wax, the artwork—from Dakar, which also brought a lot of very bright and colorful elements to our home.In Occidental culture, we have a troubled relationship with color. On the one hand, at some point in history, having color was a sign of being rich enough to afford expensive pigments, or certain processes to produce colors that were beyond what you found in regular pigments. But on the other hand, you have early theories about how color is a sign of not being very educated or refined.

When I was young, in the South of France, there were only two kids of African origins in my high school. I was a bit conscious about wearing clothes from Senegal, but I remember being so proud, it was almost ridiculous how proud I was, to wear my African wax pants, because of the colors.

My mom was a secretary in a hospital, so she had this literacy of computers. One Christmas, when I was around 14, she said, “Let’s go easy on the gifts and get a computer for the family.” We got an Intel Celeron, it was 330 megahertz, which is beyond ridiculous now. I came back from school and I remember being so drawn to it, dropping my bag, rushing to it and seeing it turn on with this little green LED. I opened the Text Editor, and I started typing, “My name is Cyril.”

My biggest contact with artistic expression when I was young was doing dance. My parents were encouraging me to study more scientific courses. I started making video games on my calculator, and I realized that was something that was somehow combining the things I really enjoyed.

[Laughs] It was strange. I would be playing video games at this arcade, where you’d go and pay for half an hour to play, and I’d stay there for hours. My girlfriend at the time would pick me up and I would start taking out my calculator and finalizing the game I was making. I remember her friend saying, “Can you believe you just spent hours in this shop and now you’re finally with us and you’re taking out your calculator and programming your game. Do you see the problem?”

As an artist, I use digital interaction as a medium. There are so many things at play. There’s room for critical thinking, there’s room for humor, there’s room to bring something unexpected, something poetic, there’s room for so many stories in the very simple, focused act of interacting with a digital system to perform an action, or to connect with someone else.

There’s also this artist who has been a mentor for me, Zach Lieberman, and he made a piece called Play the World. It’s a musical keyboard where each note will look at every radio station and find one that’s playing that exact same note. Whether it’s in the voice, or the music they’re playing, it will play the note from that radio, deconstructing the piano. You’re playing and travelling around the world. It’s hard to find something that everyone can come and understand, to find the place, the moment, an interaction that carries enough meaning that it conveys a story. When you get to that point, you feel like, ah.

I have a very constant experimental practice. An endless list of work-in-progress and prototypes. And often, my best ideas seem to be triggered by an external event or piece of information that echoes with an experiment I have been doing in the past. By experimenting on a broad range of mediums, topics, and technologies, it creates this sort of prior somewhere in my brain that makes me a lot more sensitive to new information or developments on that topic, and increases my ability to connect different elements together. I’d see an artwork, or read about a project and completely misunderstand what it’s about, by immediately connecting it to my own practice. But then this biased interpretation can be harvested to create something new. I would say my creativity comes out of misunderstanding things.

Art Selfie started as a very spontaneous, small experiment. When I started the residency, I was working a lot on portraiture, and one of the first projects was called Portrait Matcher. It matched only the portrait of the head, there was no biometric analysis. I was doing research on the poses of portraits, so it was something more physical. As a spinoff, there was this idea of the Art Selfie, a system that would show a portrait that may match you. At that time, machine learning was still early in its development. With global awareness and the use of these technologies, immediately there were these interesting questions around the potential bias in the database. Myself, being of African and French origins, I assumed that there would be no portrait that would portray someone looking like me. And then, as I was experimenting I was seeing matches from Southeast Asia, which I found super interesting. There was immediately this discussion around the political implications, the data, and what it means about art history and how it’s been collected and documented. I found it interesting that such a simple interaction could spark conversation about machine learning algorithm bias, art history, these topics were strikingly put in action in such a simple interaction that also had this aspect of being universal. We were talking earlier about this golden moment where you find something that kind of speaks to everyone, but then, this thing becomes a proxy for topics that would otherwise be very unlikely to be broached. I remember having conversations on biometrics and art history with my family that I don’t think I would have had without this.

The idea for that came with Imran, the Editor in Chief of BoF visited the lab. He presented us with this incredible collection of photographs of runways from the last several years. On the Google side, none of us are fashion experts by any means, but something really struck me about the quantity and the amount of photographs that were available, and the incredible quality of them. One way to put it was, if you could attend one fashion show per day, it would take you 10 years to see them all. Imran suggested we focus on color, and that was the kickoff of the project. It became more obvious of how people connect universally about fashion through color. I started experimenting with finding ways to extract the model, understanding how the palettes were constructed, what would be good ways to represent that in a way that can be mathematically represented, analyzed, compared, and that ended up through a series of processes, to Runway Palette.

Very naive [laughs], but also very curious. My wife, Karen Topacio, is a fashion designer. I’m sensitive to fashion’s capacity to carry so much about culture, about self-expression, sense of design, creativity, new ideas. But I appreciate it in a very amateur, distant relation.

Yes, she has her own practice, and she works in production at Marine Serre. She does her own design work independently because, as you know, it’s very hard for a designer that doesn’t have much funding to financially survive. With her own work, it’s more experimental, she did this one collection where she put wood panels through a laser cutter that turned it into flexible panels that she would then combine with neoprene.

Yes. One very powerful element of machine learning is its ability to form predictions. Basically, prediction is the extrapolation of trends, so the first step is to detect trends. I’d say this tool was the very first step in this direction. Here, the idea is to use data visualization to enable experts, students, editors, people who are interested and have the culture required to connect the dots, but using the power of this big scale analysis and visualization to facilitate the work and maybe bring out some new perspectives.

There are quite a few so that’s tricky. I’d say the response from Art Selfie was unexpected. I’m very bad with words, but being able to, through code, create this system and this moment that you feel can connect with other people, it’s always super satisfying. There’s so much adrenaline that comes with being able to connect and communicate ideas. Then there’s this thing where accidents bring you these new ideas, the bugs, the glitches, enabling these new scenarios. One of those moments was Star Field, it was a swing connected to a projector that lets you swing through the stars. I used a movement connector on the swings, and connected it to the projector, so as you balance and move on the swings, the stars move to give you this sense that you’re flying through the stars. The whole process of how that came together was completely accidental—by having a projector that turned on a screensaver, which back then was Windows 95, Star Field, and having a swing in the lab and being able to connect everything quickly, text to code, and immediately there was this “ah-ha” moment where everyone had this big smile, and you just felt like you stumbled on a golden nugget—I’d prefer a better image [Laughs]. But really, it’s this mix between discovery and invention, where you feel that you’ve brought so little, but at the same time by finding these elements and putting them together, they’ve become a new world, a new opportunity.