Crash Kiss
Crash Kiss is a programmatic portrait project I started in 2011. Early versions of Crash Kiss were done manually — shifting pixels row by row until they collided producing the combined silhouette of two human profiles. Later I teamed up with my brother who created a Crash Kiss application to do the heavy pixel lifting. Crash Kiss uses the Python programming language and its numpy array library to crash faces into each other. The algorithm moves the faces together until they touch while preserving the image's foreground and collapsing its negative space. The faces are processed in one dimension; each row of pixels is crashed in isolation of the others. The result is an unsympathetic, granular disassembly of the human subjects.
While one way to view Crash Kiss is as a playful, humorous photo booth that captures cross-screen affection between two individuals in the digital age, another way to look at the work is how our faces turn into data—how the machine doesn't care about us, how cold its eye actually is.
Fach & Asendorf Gallery
Crash Kiss was first exhibited as a pixel animation in 2012 for Fach & Asendorf Gallery, a netart gallery created by Kim Asendorf and Ole Fach. In the show “Rearrangements” I took pictures of my friends when they came out to the beach where I lived to swim and took photos of them that looked like paper dolls which I later subjected to various pixel shift transformations.
Carnegie Museum of Art
Curated by Lauren Goshinski for VIA’s #NOWSEETHIS. This was the first exhibition of the app my brother Tad Leonard created. The concept was that people could collect their “crashed” portrait instantly. We shot and crashed hundreds of people in a few short hours including friends, couples, strangers, and ourselves.
Juliana Huxtable (left) & Benoit Palop (right)
CMCA Museum
For the opening of my solo show ‘Vernal Pond’ my brother Tad Leonard and I ran another “Crash Kiss” booth.
SPACE Gallery
SPACE Gallery in Portland Maine partially funded the production of the app and hosted the very first Crash Kiss photo booth during a snow storm in Portland Maine. Several dozen came in out of the cold to be crashed.
