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Trevor Paglen ’s solo exhibition “A Color Notation” opens at Pace’s recently expanded arts complex in Seoul. The show presents new and recent landscape photography (image: Near Bodega Bay Deep Semantic Image Segments , 2022) the American artist interpreted through custom-built computer vision systems and AI. “Through his masterful manipulation of these technologies, Paglen brings questions of perception to the fore of his image making practice,” Pace notes.
“A human operator tags the ends of the intestine with drops of fluorescent glue, creating markers the robot can track.”
– Science journalist
James Gaines , describing the computer vision workflow that allowed the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) prototype to recently successfully perform
intestinal surgery on pig tissue
“It takes a filter designed for people of colour to make us realize the extent to which most filters aren’t.”
– Writer Leo Kim, exploring TikTok filters not made for white faces. “Tools of representation are neither objective nor inevitable,” writes Kim. “Like all popular technologies, their development is motivated by a variety of economic interests and swayed by assumptions and bias.”
“Neural networks are anti-fragile. Attacking makes them stronger. So-called adversarial attacks are rarely adversarial in nature. Most often they are used to fortify a neural network.”
– American artist and anti-surveillance researcher
Adam Harvey , admitting defeat in the face of AI-powered computer vision systems. In his landmark project
CV Dazzle (2010), Harvey famously defeated the CCTV-era
Viola–Jones Haar Cascade face detection algorithm with low-cost makeup and hair hacks—a tactic he now deems no longer relevant. “Resistance can only happen at a collective level,” Harvey argues.
“Although Facebook plans to delete more than one billion facial recognition templates by December, it will not eliminate the software that powers the system. The company has also not ruled out incorporating facial recognition technology into future products.”
– Technology reporters
Kashmir Hill and
Ryan Mac , parsing Facebook’s
decision to shut down its decade-old facial recognition system over societal concerns
Developed by researchers at Italy’s new-technologies agency ENEA to determine the “attraction value” for specific works of art, project ShareArt begins a trial period at the reopened Istituzione Bologna Musei . 14 camera devices (image) have been positioned near artworks to soak up data on the number of observers and their behavior as they look at a painting, sculpture, or artifact. “Thanks to AI and big data applications,” the system could help improve museum layouts and exhibit scheduling, state the researchers.
Two years after Flemish Minister-President Jan Jambon caused outrage for playing Angry Birds during a policy discussion, Belgian media artist Dries Depoorter launches The Flemish Scrollers , an AI bot that monitors the livestreams of the region’s government meetings for politicians who are on their phones. Once the system’s facial recognition detects a distracted lawmaker, it will call them out in public: a video clip is posted to Instagram and Twitter , tagging the official’s social media handle with the request to “pls stay focused!”
The latest in his Pulse series of heartbeat-synched light works, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer ’s Pulse Topology premieres at Kansas City’s Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. For the first time, the Mexican-Canadian artist integrated touchless photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors that use computer vision to detect visitors’ heartbeats. Another first: the use of LED filament light bulbs that lower the installation’s energy footprint while allowing for greater scale—instead of 100–300 bulbs, Pulse Topology is made of 3,000.
Kyle McDonald and Jonas Jongejan ’s immersive installation Light Leaks (2013) opens at Wonderspaces, Scottsdale, deploying fifty mirror balls as epicenter of profound spectacle. Using computer vision and volumetric capture of projector pixel positions, the two artists control the balls’ myriad reflections into a meditative choreography. “It’s one of the best versions we’ve ever done,” McDonald writes on Twitter , citing updated tools for better calibration.
”God damnit, Tensorflow”
– Dan Woods, software engineer and author, illustrating the absurdity of Trump-era politics by sharing a snapshot of the popular
machine learning library misidentifying the fly that landed—and stayed—on Mike Pence’s head during the 2020 US vice presidential debate
“I see a girl taking a selfie in the mirror.”
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) permanently pulls its highly cited 80 Million Tiny Images dataset, after researchers found offensive content and labelling. Scraped from Google Images in 2008, the photo library was created for training computer vision systems in advanced object-detection techniques. “It is clear that we should have manually screened [the images],” CSAIL’s Antonio Torralba told The Register . “For this, we sincerely apologize.”
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