Created by Sures Kumar, Pro-Folio is a portfolio website built from fictional identities of artists and designers. The project is a response to the “Scientific Hoax” brief at the RCA Design Interactions and theoretically can generate up to 690,903,803 trillion fictional identities with unique name and work combinations using data from various online sources.
The creation of falsified information within scientific research has a long and colourful history. The consequences of previous scientific hoaxes have been both critically beneficial and devastatingly destructive to the creators and recipients of these fictions. Some are designed and deliberately revealed in order to complete their agendas, whereas others continue to charade as the truth. Given the availability of information online ranging from open source names to college databases, computers can construct a believable identity in no time. All it takes is to carefully lay the facts in a logical sequence, which can be coded as an algorithm. If this is possible, can computer programs create all sorts of human identities in future? And what will be the motivation to do so? Will it be just populating identities and adding noise to our already overloaded Internet or will it give birth to interesting, engaging, avant-garde, mysterious identities and art works?
The system constantly learns from the users behaviour and ranks identities and projects. Thus a score value is assigned for each successful combination eg. (First Name – Last Name), (Full Name – Location), (Name, Place – College), etc. Based on these scores the algorithm generates identifies which are more believable and engaging. The project questions the nominal authenticity of works, which constructs artist’s and designers online identity (i.e. Name, Education, Work, etc).
Created using PHP, MySQL, Processing, HTML, CSS and Javascript. Sources include Behance, Cargocollective, Squarespace and Artybollocks.
Pro-Folio | Project Page | Sures Kumar
Previously on CAN: Pixelate by by Sures Kumar and Lana Z Porter
