Talk:Kyle McDonald

Proposed revised article text

Kyle McDonald is an American new media artist, researcher, and software developer whose work explores surveillance, computer vision, machine learning, and the creative reuse of emerging technologies. He was a member of the Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab) and served as a community manager for openFrameworks. He has taught at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and held artist residencies at institutions including Carnegie Mellon’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM). His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Ars Electronica.

Career and notable projects

In 2011, McDonald released FaceOSC, an open-source application that tracks a user’s facial movements via webcam and translates them into real-time data for controlling music, graphics, and other systems.^[1] The project became widely used within the creative coding community and helped popularize accessible facial tracking tools for artists.

That same year he collaborated with Arturo Castro on Face Substitution, an early real-time face-swapping project built using computer vision techniques.^[2] A demonstration video of the project circulated widely online and received significant media attention. Face Substitution was nominated for the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year 2012 in the digital category.^[3] The work is frequently cited as an early artistic exploration of live face swapping, preceding the widespread adoption of similar techniques in consumer applications.

In 2011, McDonald created People Staring at Computers, a project in which he installed custom software on Apple Store display computers to automatically photograph visitors looking at the screens.^[4] Over two days, the software captured hundreds of candid images that were published online. The project generated international media coverage and prompted an investigation by the United States Secret Service. The incident sparked public debate about privacy, surveillance, and the boundaries between art and intrusion in commercial spaces.

In 2013, McDonald collaborated with Jonas Jongejan on Light Leaks, an immersive installation using 50 mirror disco balls and synchronized projectors to fill a room with moving reflections.^[5] The artists used structured-light 3D scanning to map each reflection, creating a shifting field of light that alternates between meditative and disorienting effects. The installation has been exhibited internationally.

In 2014, McDonald served as the inaugural media artist in residence at Spotify. During this residency, he developed Serendipity, a web-based visualization mapping instances of two users pressing play on the same song at the same moment around the world.^[6] The project visualized synchronized listening behavior in real time.

In 2015, McDonald launched Exhausting a Crowd, an online participatory artwork inspired by An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges Perec.^[7] The project consists of 12 hours of fixed-camera footage of London’s Piccadilly Circus, which viewers can watch and annotate collaboratively. Participants add descriptive captions to specific moments in the video, collectively cataloguing events occurring in the public square.

In 2018, McDonald developed ICESpy, a web-based project that used facial recognition to identify employees of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by matching photographs against publicly available professional profile images.^[8] The work examined the asymmetry of surveillance technologies and the ethics of facial recognition.

In 2022, McDonald created Amends, a series of NFT-based digital sculptures designed to fund carbon removal and offset the historical emissions of major NFT marketplaces.^[9] The project set a target to raise funds sufficient to remove hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide, positioning the work as both critique and remediation of blockchain-related environmental impact.

Consulting and collaborations

In addition to his independent artworks, McDonald works as a consultant and collaborator on creative technology projects. He has contributed to projects with Google Creative Lab, including The Infinite Drum Machine and Bird Sounds, interactive experiments applying machine learning to organize large sound datasets.^[10] He has advised artists, cultural institutions, and technology companies on computer vision, interactive systems, and creative applications of machine learning.

McDonald regularly leads workshops and lectures internationally on creative coding, computer vision, and machine learning in artistic practice. His open-source contributions and educational work have influenced the creative coding and new media art communities.

Reason for requested changes

The current article places disproportionate emphasis on generative adversarial networks (GANs), which do not accurately represent the central focus of McDonald’s work. It also omits several widely covered and influential projects, including FaceOSC, Face Substitution, People Staring at Computers, Light Leaks, Exhausting a Crowd, ICESpy, and Amends, as well as his consulting and collaborative work. The proposed revision provides a more balanced and comprehensive overview based on independent reliable sources.

Thank you to any independent editors who review and consider these proposed updates in accordance with Wikipedia’s policies on neutrality, verifiability, and conflict of interest.

Proposed revised article text

Kyle McDonald is a media artist and researcher whose work uses computer vision, machine learning, and other computational techniques.^[1] He has been an adjunct professor at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, a member of the Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab), community manager for openFrameworks, and an artist in residence at Carnegie Mellon University's STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM).^[2]

Selected projects

In 2011, McDonald released FaceOSC, a webcam-based facial-tracking program. Vice described the program using facial movements to control music.^[3]

That year, McDonald also collaborated with Arturo Castro on Face Substitution, a real-time face-swapping project that set the stage for later Deepfake techniques.^[4]

Also in 2011, McDonald created People Staring at Computers, installing custom software on display computers in Apple Stores in New York City that automatically photographed people. After the project was published online, U.S. Secret Service agents raided McDonald and confiscated his computer.^[5]

In 2013, McDonald and Jonas Jongejan created Light Leaks, an immersive installation using 50 disco balls, multiple projectors, and structured light 3-D scanning to map reflected light across a room.^[6]

In 2014, McDonald became Spotify's first media artist in residence and created Serendipity, a real-time map showing instances when listeners in different places played the same song at nearly the same moment.^[7]

In 2015, he created Exhausting a Crowd, an online work inspired by Georges Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Commissioned by the Victoria and Albert Museum, it presented 12 hours of footage from London's Piccadilly Circus and allows viewers to attach annotations to people and events in the video.^[8]

In 2016, McDonald was part of the team that developed Terrapattern, an open-access visual search engine for satellite imagery that allowed users to select a location and find visually similar patterns elsewhere.^[9]

In 2018, McDonald launched ICESpy, a facial-recognition project intended to identify people associated with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement using a dataset scraped from LinkedIn.^[10] The project received renewed attention in 2026 after federal complaints challenging state identification requirements for ICE officers specifically cited ICESpy.^[11]

In 2022, McDonald created Amends, a project consisting of three NFTs tied to physical sculptures. The works were listed on OpenSea, Rarible, and Foundation with starting prices based on estimates of the cost of mitigating the historical emissions associated with those marketplaces' use of proof-of-work blockchains.^[12]

In 2026, McDonald created Apocalypse Early Warning System, a real-time alert app using publicly available flight-tracking data to monitor business-jet activity. The system compares the number of aircraft in flight with historical baselines and sends alerts when traffic diverges from expected patterns.^[13][14][15]

Collaborations

McDonald has collaborated with Google Creative Lab on machine-learning projects including The Infinite Drum Machine and Bird Sounds.^[16]

He also collaborated with Es Devlin on The Poem Pavilion, the United Kingdom's national pavilion for Expo 2020 Dubai. The pavilion used GPT-2 to generate collective poems from words submitted by visitors, which were displayed across its facade.^[17] McDonald and his studio, IYOIYO, developed the project's language-model and generative-text system.^[18]