You've Been Rugged expands the imagination of the 2019 piece, [Self] Confidence by adding a chain of contemporary [2025] neural network technologies into a process that finishes with a digital tapestry.
[Self] Confidence maps the space. It uses one neural network to identify subjects—humans—with a "confidence score" and a second neural network to classify that human as an object (what it sees inside the bounding box that surrounds that human). You've Been Rugged takes the raw and limited primitive 2019 data from [Self] Confidence and engages a series of four more neural networks to labor towards a co-crafted output.
As the name suggests, [Self] Confidence is interested in the concept of confidence and scoring that confidence to what it sees. You've Been Rugged instead is interested in how we might create a space for the surveilled to be emotionally connected or even have some sort of companionship with the bots that surveil us. The chain of neural networks eagerly working in the background easily fill-in between the lines, as plausible as they can imagine, what the 2019-based technology leaves out. They conjure up reasons for why the surveilled person-derived objects are in this space, where they stand in relation to each other and what each has had for breakfast.
Following along the chain and forward, the chain settles for a moment with a depiction of the place where one was surveilled, along with others, and metamorphoses this information into a digital tapestry. We end the collaborative chain of neural networks with a tapestry form on purpose. A tapestry, although digital in this case, perhaps is in its natural habitat here in the Röhsska, a Museum of Design and Craft. Moreover, in the world of AI, the word "tapestry" is a reference to one of the most preferred words chosen by OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Essentially, You've Been Rugged and these surveillance objects fabulated and their imagined accompanying human presence is where one can experience how the surveillance data is crafted, and our presence amongst our AI companions are simultaneously acting between some state of predicted real and predicted surreal, pixels and threads.