Category Archives for Machine Vision
Hostile machine vision
One of our goals in MACHINE VISION is to analyse how machine vision is represented in art, stories, games and popular culture. A really common trope is showing machine vision as hostile and as dangerous to humans. Machine vision is … Continue reading
Seeing brainwaves
Last week I was in London, where I visited Pierre Huyghe’s exhibition Uumwelt at the Serpentine Gallery. You walk in, and there are flies in the air, flies and a large screen showing images flickering past, fast. The images are generated by … Continue reading
Generating portraits from DNA: Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Becoming Chelsea
Did you know you can generate a portrait of a person’s face based on a sample of their DNA? The thing is, despite companies selling this service to the police to help them identify suspects, it’s not really that accurate. … Continue reading
The god trick and the idea of infinite, technological vision
When I was at the INDVIL workshop about data visualisation on Lesbos a couple of weeks ago, everybody kept citing Donna Haraway. “It’s the ‘god trick’ again,” they’d say, referring to Haraway’s 1988 paper on Situated Knowledges. In it, she … Continue reading
Best Guess for this Image: Brassiere ( The sexist, commercialised gaze of image recognition algorithms.)
Did you know the iPhone will search your photos for brassieres and breasts, but not for shoulders, knees and toes? Or boxers and underpants either for that matter. “Brassiere” seems to be a codeword for cleavage and tits.
My project on machine vision will be funded by the ERC!
Amazing news today: my ERC Consolidator project is going to be funded! This is huge news: it’s a €2 million grant that will allow me to build a research team to work for five years to understand how machine vision … Continue reading
Teaching drone vision
This semester I’m teaching a graduate seminar in digital media aesthetics on machine vision, and in today’s class we discussed drone art, using Dziga Vertov’s manifesto from 1923 (“I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show … Continue reading
How Do Machines See? My Graduate Seminar this Semester
I’m really excited about the course I’m teaching this semester. DIKULT303: Digital Media Aesthetics is a graduate seminar with a topic that changes from year to year, and this year it will be about machine vision, my current obsession, and … Continue reading
