ABOUT
Ambiguous Boundaries -windows- is an interactive video installation in which a display mounted on the gallery wall functions as a window. On screen, pre-recorded footage of the space just outside the gallery plays continuously—an ordinary, unremarkable scene. But something is wrong: the people peering in through this “window” wear the viewer’s own face. Their clothes are different, their hair is different, but the face is unmistakably yours.
At the start, the viewer’s face is photographed. A deep learning-based face swap system then transplants their features—in real time—onto figures in the pre-recorded video. The result: strangers outside the window are looking in at you, wearing your face.
Deepfake technology is conventionally used so that one person can assume another’s identity—I become someone else. This work inverts that operation entirely: here, others become you. This reversal transforms deepfake from a tool of self-projection into a mechanism of involuntary self-dispersion—your face escapes you, proliferating across bodies you do not control.
The “window” frame is central to the work’s meaning. A window is where inside meets outside, where your private space ends and the public world begins. In this installation, that spatial boundary mirrors a psychological one: the boundary between self and other. When the outside world is populated by your own face, both boundaries dissolve simultaneously. The viewer’s sense of bounded selfhood is destabilized—not by becoming someone else, but by discovering that someone else has already become them.
By inverting the directionality of deepfake, the work raises a question not about the reliability of images, but about the stability of selfhood—opening a space for reflection on identity, authenticity, and the increasingly porous boundary between the self and its computational doubles.
「一体誰がこんなことしたんだ？」と考えていたことが，結局自分自身の仕業だったことが判明して驚くことが稀にあります．そのようなとき，今の瞬間の自分自身から考えると想像できない，他者のような存在として行動する少し過去の自分自身という，正真正銘の自分自身とは少し異なる存在を意識することもあるかもしれません．
本作品では，鑑賞者の視覚的な顔の特徴量があらかじめ抽出され，その後観る映像の中に身に覚えのない自分自身が登場します．鑑賞者は，その正真正銘の自分自身ではない存在を通して，自身と他者，あるいは現実と非現実の境界を曖昧にしていきます．
DATE CREATED
March 15th, 2025.
CREDIT
Scott Allen