Artificial intelligence and institutional critique 2.0: unexpected ways of seeing with computer vision
- PDF / 4,437,547 Bytes
- 23 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 104 Downloads / 182 Views
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Artificial intelligence and institutional critique 2.0: unexpected ways of seeing with computer vision Gabriel Pereira1 · Bruno Moreschi2 Received: 25 July 2019 / Accepted: 18 August 2020 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract During 2018, as part of a research project funded by the Deviant Practice Grant, artist Bruno Moreschi and digital media researcher Gabriel Pereira worked with the Van Abbemuseum collection (Eindhoven, NL), reading their artworks through commercial image-recognition (computer vision) artificial intelligences from leading tech companies. The main takeaways were: somewhat as expected, AI is constructed through a capitalist and product-focused reading of the world (values that are embedded in this sociotechnical system); and that this process of using AI is an innovative way for doing institutional critique, as AI offers an untrained eye that reveals the inner workings of the art system through its glitches. This paper aims to regard these glitches as potentially revealing of the art system, and even poetic at times. We also look at them as a way of revealing the inherent fallibility of the commercial use of AI and machine learning to catalogue the world: it cannot comprehend other ways of knowing about the world, outside the logic of the algorithm. But, at the same time, due to their “glitchy” capacity to level and reimagine, these faulty readings can also serve as a new way of reading art; a new way for thinking critically about the art image in a moment when visual culture has changed form to hybrids of human–machine cognition and “machine-to-machine seeing”. Keywords Institutional critique · Computer vision · Error · Image analysis · Contemporary art
1 Introduction: Duchamp’s Fountain is a urinal MORESCHI: On 23 October 2017, Gabriel sent me an email. In it, there were two images—a painting of Christ and Duchamp’s Fountain. The email went on with a series of graphics, percentages and keywords analyzing these two images. At no point were they interpreted as art. Duchamp’s Fountain was described as a plumbing fixture, product design and as… a urinal. Behind this reading was Google’s state-of-the-art AI: Google Cloud Vision (Fig. 1). The image of Duchamp’s Fountain is especially relevant as a starting point. With this artwork, as Calvin Tomkins (1998) details in his biography of Duchamp, the French artist aimed to test how democratic the New York Society of * Gabriel Pereira [email protected] 1
Department of Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
2
Independent Artists was in the selection process for their salon. Those who work with art may be familiar with this controversial story: after having lunch with Walter Arensberg and Joseph Stella, Duchamp invited them to accompany him to J. L. Mott Iron Works, a store in New York that specializes in sanitary equipment. There, he bought a porcelain Bedfordshire urinal
Data Loading...
