“Eigenvekil” (“eigen deputy”) is a new piece by Ali Miharbi, now on show at Karsi Art gallery in Istanbul. Eigenvekil is the statistical average of the pictures of all the 550 congressmen in the current Turkish Parliament. A camera-PC-screen installation, where you can see the statistical reflection of all the congressmen on your face. To create this image Ali used the eigenface technique, which is commonly used by security officers for face recognition.
Ali says that “political representation, mathematical representation, or artistic representation, like all others, blur the properties of the subject that is represented. Eigenvekil uses these three representation techniques together to point the problem of representative democracy.”
More about Ali Miharbi
http://rhizome.org/member.php?user_id=1005051
The image below shows the top eigenfaces from the Ali’s program.
Hey Burak, thanks for the review! 🙂
You wrote “Eigenvekil is the statistical average of the pictures of all the 550 congressmen in the current Turkish Parliament”, however the main point of the project is “the statistical reconstruction of camera images based on pictures of all the 550 congressmen”. What I call “Eigenvekil”, is in fact no different than an eigenface or eigenvector, each of which is a component used for this reconstruction. The average face is the first eigenface, only one of 550 other eigenfaces/eigenvekils. Just wanted to point this out to avoid any misunderstandings.