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Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez: Who Am I Asks Who Are You

In identity studies Series I, 20 crowds of faces made with AI models trained only on his own code and images ask where identity comes from once machines join the room.

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Madrid-based Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez took the title of his new series from José Ortega y Gasset: "if I don't save my circumstances, I don't save myself. If I don't love them, I don't love myself." On October 12 he pointed out that the philosopher's sentence is usually cut in half. "I am myself and my circumstance" is the part everyone remembers. "The second half is the demanding one," he wrote. "The others are not optional." identity studies Series I, 20 works released on October 10, each a 1 of 1 on Ethereum, is built on that second half.

The works are crowds. "A crowd is not a mass," he wrote on October 11. "Looked at closely it is a set of faces, each one turned towards another, each one borrowing something from the person next to it." His reasoning is about the present. As machines take on the activities many people built their lives around, more of us have to ask who we are once we no longer do what we used to do, and "we look for the answer in each other." AI now also mediates the places where we meet, a new other in our circumstance "that is shaped by us and that shapes us." His shortest version: "Who am I asks who are you."

The making follows a method he has used for years: generative systems he codes himself, AI models trained on that work and on his own images, and prompts that stay inside "that learned grammar," so what the models have learned is "a way of seeing that is mine, not the internet's." For Series I he pushed the models off balance on purpose, with perturbations in the diffusion process and altered weights, and the identities came out "recognisable and not quite right, which is close to how many of us feel at the moment." He also noticed that the more organic the training material, the more of its character a model keeps: the crowds owe more to hand drawings and family photographs than to the geometry of his coded systems.

Look closely and the faces rarely stand alone. Nº 09 shows "two figures, which are many, not quite separable." In Nº 15 the figures turn outward, toward something beyond the frame, "the moment of looking for the answer in somebody else." In Nº 18 faces press close, each half hidden by the next: "nobody in it is fully visible, and nobody is fully hidden either." Series 0, last year, asked what identity looks like in intermediate, dreamt and synthetic states. Series I asks where it comes from, and in these works the answer is "from the others."

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