The Average Congressman of the Turkish Parliament

“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.

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