Posts
 |
| White stood next to his prints (including the cello, in orange) at the Nature Morte gallery. Photo: Ramesh Pathania |
We live in a world that’s increasingly controlled by what
might be called “the algorithmic gaze.” As we cede more decision-making
power to machines in domains like health care, transportation, and
security, the world as seen by computers becomes the dominant reality.
If a facial recognition system doesn’t recognize the color of your skin,
for example, it won’t acknowledge your existence. If a self-driving car
can’t see you walk across the road, it’ll drive right through you.
That’s the algorithmic gaze in action.
This sort of slow-burning structural change can be
difficult to comprehend. But as is so often the case with societal
shifts, artists are leaping headfirst into the epistemological fray. One
of the best of these is Tom White, a lecturer in computational design
at the University of Wellington in New Zealand whose art depicts the
world, not as humans see it, but as algorithms do.
White started making this kind of artwork in late 2017 with a series of
prints called “The Treachery of ImageNet.” The name combines the title
of René Magritte’s famous painting
of a pipe that isn’t a pipe, and ImageNet, a database of pictures
that’s used across the industry to train and test machine vision
algorithms. “It seemed like a natural parallel for me,” White tells The Verge. “Plus, I can’t resist a pun.”...
Kalyanaraman suggests that art made with AI demonstrates that computers
may deserve credit as creative actors. The type of machine learning used
by White and his peers works by sifting through large amounts of data
and then replicating the patterns it finds. Kalyanaraman suggests that
this is similar to the process by which humans learn art, but that our
“mysticism” surrounding the notion of creativity stops us from seeing
the parallels. “If a machine can make humanly surprising, stylistically
new kinds of art, I think it is foolish to say well it’s not really creative because it doesn’t have consciousness,” he says.
Source: The Verge
