Masked Identity uses artificial intelligence (A.I) to explore the subject of faces, traditions and identity, especially its malleability in the age of technology. Throughout our years of existence, we’ve crafted and performed several kinds of rituals and ceremonies as acts of transformation and transcendence. Masks have been fundamental across the Indian culture in our journeys into unknown realms, in our celebrations of the malleability of identity, or as a tool for practical disguise and entertainment. It helps us engage with our world from a completely new vantage point, amalgamated yet alienated, augmenting our own sense of self, very similar to what technology, especially A.I enables today. What happens when these media of transcendence collide? In the process of wearing masks, an individual’s identity dissolves and transforms into a collective identity. I try to capture this blurring between individual unique identities and gateways of collective imagined identities within the dataset for training my A.I, keeping percentage of it human faces and percentage masks. The trained model creates a new form of identity– a hybrid identity of the individual and the imagined collective, a Masked Identity- inviting the audience to reflect on their individual and collective cultural selves, presented now through the possibilities of AI.
