Chloe McFadden is a media artist making and writing on Gadigal Land and is interested in how technology informs and interacts with our meaning making practices. She is currently in her honours year of a Media arts degree at UNSW where she is researching creative methods for engaging with machine learning. Her current method of making involves working with neural networks to create 2D images, 3D objects and installations. Chloe likes to create artworks with these different methods of making that all feed into one another, and form new and exciting trains of thought or things to try. Her favourite things to make are works that never feel done, and will keep her up at night ruminating - months after she has put them down. In the future she hopes to do more research, make lots of art, write lots of stuff, and learn and unlearn a bunch of things. She wants to continue researching creative ways of engaging with machine learning, and hopes to one day understand better why she finds the things they make so strange and wonderful.

GENERATED TOOLS,

(2021), is a digital mixed media work featuring the collaborative creative output of myself, and a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). It is an iteration of my ongoing work in Honours, in which I work alongside a GAN to generate tools - which exist as 2D images, 3D objects and moving images.

In doing this, I am looking at how machine learning can generate surprising, uncanny and visually indeterminate outcomes that can encourage audiences to rethink, or reconsider the ways we understand the objects around us. As we come into contact with these strange, or indeterminate tools we can speculate about what a tool is without a prescribed function, and the aesthetics, performances and assumptions that surround the tools lying around our own homes.

The first part of the work is a digital mixed media video that hosts the generated objects on a tool wall. Upon the wall there are 2D tools, 3D printed tools that have been photographed and latent space walk videos, that capture parts of the possibility space of tools created by the GAN. In the mixing of materialities, the objects are tool-like and strange - there are recognisable handles, blades, holes, all of which are just not quite in the right places.

Accompanying this is a doctored Bunnings catalogue - featuring the generated tools as they both sit as products available for purchase and also invade the lifestyle images. I have also included photos of the 3D tools as supporting
material.