This installation, at its core, was about magnetic distortion. When formulating it, my collaborator and I wanted to use old school tech, specifically a CRT TV. It was for a sonic arts installation opportunity, so we needed an audio element as well. I had recently used magnets to prepare a piano for a chamber piece, and we realized when looking at Nam June Paik installations that neodymium magnets distorted tube TVs in a very interesting way, and that they also made magnetic tape decay over time. We also wanted movement in the visual distortion, which is where the motors came from. I broke two walkmen so that they could produce a tape loop, with one recording and the other playing back the recording about 20 seconds later. The tape loop is running across a magnet, and the motors have magnets attached to them causing the visual distortion. 

From an artistic perspective, self-portrait is a study of self-destruction. Machine-learning models are increasingly trained on recursively generated data, a cyclical process that could unwittingly corrupt their output. This deterioration mirrors the human condition; computers are simply following in our footsteps.