Media

Featured in Nature

January 2024: Machine Vision is one of five “best science picks” in Nature! Read Andrew Robinson’s short review of the book.

Monet and Machine Vision on BBC 4’s Start the week

Jill visited the BBC’s Radio 4 show Start the Week on November 20, 2023 to talk about Machine Vision with Jackie Wullschläger, who has just published a biography of Monet, and Mat Collishaw, an artist whose exhibition Petrichor uses AI and other machine vision technologies to explore our relationship to the environment. The BBC’s Tom Sutcliffe hosted the conversation, which you can listen to on the BBC website or your favourite podcast app. The first 13 minutes are about Monet, but don’t worry, there are many connections to machine vision.

Mentioned in ArtReview

“These intersecting histories of cameras, smart surveillance and AI are one of the subjects of Jill Walker Rettberg’s book Machine Vision, also published last September, in which Rettberg, through ethnography and media theory, explores how algorithms are changing the way we see the world. She references Alphonse Bertillon, the police officer and criminologist who invented the mugshot, whose ‘anthropometrics’ combined photography with mathematical measurements and classifications of people – a racist, misogynist and ableist physiognomic legacy that still lurks in today’s AI systems. While Rettberg thought the pseudoscience informing machine vision would lead to mass mistrust of images, she writes, the opposite has come to be true.”

Isabelle Bucklow for ArtReview, 24 November 2024.

Reviews

“…a lively, information-rich book…”

Johanna Drucker for JD: ABCs, January 2025

“Rettberg employs a wide range of situations and stories, from art and games to films and fiction, as analytical tools. These examples provide emotionally rich and often visceral, embodied insights. (..) Rettberg’s book is a deep and comprehensive study that provides rich information and diverse perspectives on understanding machine vision technology, likely enormously inspiring scholars from various disciplines, including media, art, policy, and marketing.”

Yifei Zhao for Television & New Media, November 2024

“The nature of the influence exerted by machine vision on society as a whole will be all the more fruitfully considered and discussed with the help of [Rettberg’s] book, which is written in clear and accessible language.”

Tam Hanna for c’t: Magazin für Computertechnik 25/2023 page 166