Andrea Gagliano

FeatureImage_G. Washington_2020

Madam President 2020 (pre-election) reimagines all of the US Presidents as females. The stories of the female presidents and their accomplishments in founding and progressing the United States are showcased through a Wikipedia page. The photographs, manipulated with a StyleGAN, highlight the power of Generative Adversarial Networks to rewrite histories. Seeing generations of female presidents at the helm can empower females today to see themselves in leadership roles.

To create Madam President, I manipulated original photographs of the US Presidents in the feminine direction with StyleGAN. Doing so illuminated many of the biases inherent in StyleGAN. For example, the females in Madam President tend to have larger smiles than their male counterparts, as well as colorful makeup. When working with the technology, I also noticed that moving the presidents further in the masculine direction resulted in lighter skin. For example, a more masculine version of Barack Obama was a bearded white male. These limitations in the technology prevent it from truly being used to reimagine our histories.

Project link: http://andrea-gagliano.com/madam_president.html

F.D_Roosevelt
B. Obama
madam_president_exhibit