Gittit Szwarc - Portfolio

[01—02]: Projects from the DAE Pre-Master program

[03—05]: Selected works for jewelry brand KNOBBLY — Instagram

[01] Premaster final project, 2024

The act of extending our selves with technologies we create has been fundamental in the trajectory of humans. We do not simply use our tools: as we create them, they also create us, modify us, shape us.
I'm interested in the nature of this entanglement we are in with our machines, this relationship: the cyborg condition. This condition, while not new, is certainly accelerating, and I find myself struggling sometimes to still sense a boundary between myself and my machines.

01 / Adversarial Mono

The first part of this project was a way of reasserting this distance: I developed a working font which humans can read, but machines cannot.

02 / Feelings About Machines

In the second part, I gathered seven short texts I'd written describing personal and visceral emotions about my relationship with machines into a zine. The zine was set in Adversarial Mono, printed in risograph in 25 copies and hand-bound.

There is no information in the zine that needs to be hidden from the machines (in any interpretation of the idea). Why, then, so many layers of removal? A font they can't read, a text that devolves towards almost body horror, a printed object that cannot become training data, a tactility they cannot register? I came to realize this project isn't so much about shutting the machines out as about trying to find a sense of allyship with the other humans.

Presentation

With the zine in their hands, I asked the audience to turn to each other, and to each choose a text for the other to read to them. Finally, I invited them to contribute to an open document (projected overhead for the duration of the exhibition) and leave their own message, for human eyes only.

[Update 13/05/2024: as of version 4o, released on this date, ChatGPT is able to accurately extract text set in Adversarial Mono from an image.]

Process & Research

[In a study by Dr. Tamara Makin at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, the researcher] "invited participants to wear a robotic 'Third Thumb' (...) Less than a week after the introduction of the new finger, fMRI scans of the participants’ brains revealed that their natural body representation—the “mental picture” of their own hands in their motor cortex—had changed. (...) Their fingers were collapsing into one another, as though they were being squeezed together to make room for the new thumb."

[TOP]: An Afghan war rug (2010) depicting the 9/11 attack, with three towers instead of two. [BOTTOM]: Typical image of a hand generated by Midjourney (2024), with extra fingers. I began my research into the possibility of an adversarial font from the question: what are "machine-like" mistakes, and what are "human-like" ones? What do the types of mistakes each of us makes reveal about "human-ness" and "machine-ness"?

From "The Invisible Hand" (2021), by Claire L. Evans, published on pioneerworks.org

Google Lens attempts (and fails) to read text set in Adversarial Mono

Unsuccessful first attempts at adversarial text: as long as the modifications I made were in the scope of one character at a time, machines were able to read the text as well as humans.

The first glitch that worked (humans could read it, machines could not): I sliced text set in Adobe Garamond horizontally and displaced it so the characters crossed into each other's territory. The final font is based on Courier New.

[02] Strange Prosthetic Friend, 2023

A prototype I made early in the research process, to emulate a state of simplified cyborgism and begin to investigate the feelings that arise. The apparatus's eight fuzzy "fingers" or villi are moved by a pulley strung on a finger, mirroring a simple hand gesture. Although this wasn't the original intention, I found I could fold fingers together with the polydactyl prosthesis, and that the gesture was surprisingly comforting.

Materials: wooden dowels, tongue depressors, cardboard, glue, pipe cleaners, zip tie, string

[03] Jewelry display sculptures, 2022

Material: paper mâché, acrylic paintPhotos: Essell Creative

[04] Mask Piece, 2020

My pandemic offering, and a personal investigation of my relationship with norms of intellectual property. The Mask Piece slips on to a fabric mask in lieu of the nose wire, and can be adjusted to improve fit. Alongside the jewel, which like all my designs was commercially available, I published both DIY instructions and CAD files of the base design under open license. I reached out to artists and designers to invite them to create their own versions, some of which became part of the designers' own lines; and created a website for the project where these versions were also published. The project was, in part, a response to troubles in the realm of intellectual property: having been on the radar of mass manufacturers for several years following a viral moment, many of my designs were quickly copied and distributed. By fully sharing the rights to my own design I attempted to subvert my own difficult emotions and embrace a complete letting go of ownership.

Above: smartphone format templates (posted on Instagram stories) for forming a mask piece out of a paper clip. The templates are resized using the ghost paper clip as guide until it matches the physical paper clip, thus achieving the accurate scale regardless of screen size.

Right: project website including downloadable templates, CAD files, videos, and submissions.

[05] Some Jewels, 2020 — 2024

Pod Locket

Film stills from video created in collaboration with Zohar Baranovitch.

I wanted to recreate the childlike gesture of unlocking a tiny vessel to reveal a precious secret. The locket's ball hinge references plastic toy boxes; a key dangles from the necklace clasp; and concealed within the locket are two mixed gemstones. Materials: sterling silver, pearls, lab-grown sapphire.

Perfume Earring

Extrapolating from antique perfume bottle and pomander pendants, I created a pair of earrings bringing the scent closer to the wearer's nose: thus the scent becomes a personal pleasure and mantle of protection rather than a signal to one's surroundings. One earring holds the perfume and is perforated to allow for subtle evaporation. Its pair doubles as a device for funneling the fragrance from a spray bottle into the small vessel's opening, bringing an element of ritual to the wearing. Material: sterling silver.

[ABOVE]: Film stills from video created in collaboration with Zohar Baranovitch. The full video can be viewed here. [BELOW LEFT]: Filter created in collaboration with artist Karin Kimel

[ABOVE]: a face filter created for Instagram with the Perfume Earrings. The filter was a lockdown experiment with the idea of creating a series, one for each item of a collection, in lieu of shooting a lookbook; however, only the first was realized. [RIGHT]: illustrated single spread manual accompanying the collection.

Pod Locket 2.0

In this second iteration on the idea of the irresistible tiny key guarding a keepsake, the "key" is made of curved gold wire, with a gemstone head and a finely threaded tail. The key enters through a hole in the body of the locket, fits tightly through a loop on the back lid, exits through a second hole and is finally locked with a gold cube nut. Materials: sterling silver, 14k gold, moissanite.

Viewport Locket

After many iterations of precious and secret, a counter-locket: the contents invitingly in open view, easily changed or discarded. A paper insert, cut to size, can be slid in and out through the top of the frame (and is used as a template to cut out new inserts). Material: sterling silver / gold vermeil, paper insert

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