In 2018, supported by an Arts Council England grant, I took a break from my film career to pursue 'AI Intimacy and Creativity', at a point prior to AI becoming mainstream. A catalyst was my research set decorating for the film Brexit: Uncivil War, where I became interested in the psych profiling political parties were doing, data ethics, and human identity as an algorithm. It was a steep learning curve, through an online micro-masters in Artificial Intelligence and an edX coding course, and with the help of a technologist friend, Tom.

The core material outcome of this R&D period was an attempt to look at faces that had never existed. I had already been working on imagined artists and their works, and collaging portraits, and this was a progression.

Using early machine learning frameworks and TensorFlow, I generated portraits of fictional, non-existent artists alongside portraits of their equally non-existent muses, with a candid, normcore, unprofessional aesthetic.

I was using these sterile tech systems, typically designed for impersonal profiling and mass manipulation, to create intimacy and connection instead: looking into eyes, meeting a face-to-face gaze, and seeing what that was like, given it was an AI creation.

As someone 'non techie', the motive was conceptual: using code as a tool for character-building and world-building, stepping away from the idealized oil painting of my early practice to see what the machine could reveal about the human gaze.

This early AI work has fed into my long-time fascination with inventing artists as a framework to express parts of my own psyche.