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Yesterday's Heroes: Reprogramming Melbourne's Public Art Monuments

First Site: Matthew Flinders, Cnr Swanston and Flinders Streets

Melbourne, 3000, AU

2024 - ongoing at various sites (originally commissioned by Melbourne Design Week)

Play video through opening credits and turn audio on

This project profiles statues' faces and other features of public monuments and artworks in Melbourne, with an eye for play, criticality, satire and genuine data collection and analysis. Given monuments’ stoicism in the face of cancel culture and identity politics Bishop and Reis question their ongoing significance in the urban landscape for the way they shape collective memory and cultural narratives. The project employs hybrid analogue and AI technologies, combining machine learning, infra-red scanning techniques, cathode tube-screens, data scraping, and archival research. Beginning with Matthew Flinders’ visage at the bottom end of Swanston St Bishop and Reis technicians will evaluate the statue’s facial characteristics, assessing its personality traits and representational integrity, measuring the underlying bias of the subject, the artist and the original commissioners. The performative technicians will capture hundreds of high-resolution images, and through training a dataset on the facial features and historical images of Flinders, they will re-model his head in 3D printed keyrings - that will be given away to the public as souvenirs. The work will be further explained on-site in a doc (moc) umentary exploring the place as much as the work, drawing on new and historical footage of the site and interviews with data scientists, historians, and art experts.

Preliminary 3D mapping and AI facial recog. Play video through opening credits and turn audio on

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