NSFW Venus © Livia Foldes, 2023

Livia Foldes questions how computers are taught to see and interpret bodies and identities. In her series NSFW Venus, she appropriates and alters images from a pornography-detection dataset to reflect on the parallels between colonial archives and machine learning datasets.

From phrenology to sexology, photographic archives and bodily measurement have played integral roles in constructions of race, gender, and obscenity. Today, as in the past, institutions use technologies of vision and quantification to transform bodies into data — and use that data to classify, predict, discipline and erase.

Foldes is influenced by artist Stephanie Syjuco’s use of Photoshop’s “healing brush” to remove subjects from prison mugshots in anthropological archives. By using these tools, Foldes asks what healing could mean for machine learning archives that are endlessly copied and recirculated?

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