trevor paglen, how to see like a machine

 first, check out his How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI (verso)

 

but also, this article about paglen:   https://aestheticamagazine.com/trevor-paglenseeing-like-a-machine/

 

which contains:

 

1)  "He’s also been doing a similar thing with landscapes of the American West, as well in Clouds, where skyscapes are overlaid with lines indicating what algorithms – such as those in guided missiles, drones and self-driving cars – “see” when they scrape images for patterns."  ['scrape images for patterns' is an evocative phrase; human sight feels like so much more than that but that feeling is both real (vision probably isn't reducible to that) and suspect ("scrape" could feel like an attractive mismatch ala 'humans are hard coded or wired to blah blah', which themselves interestingly use both digital and physical metaphors to reinforce predestination).

 

2) " Barely two pages into the first chapter of this book, Paglen makes a startling revelation: “the vast majority of images are now made by machines, for other machines.” And he’s not just talking about AI generation – although that’s a key point – he’s referencing the five billion smartphone shots taken every day, too. Pictures made with digital cameras are immaterial – they can only be seen by humans under specific circumstances, returning to code when screens are switched off. Crucially, unlike analogue negatives, they don’t need to be seen by humans to be manipulated, disseminated and harvested. It’s a state of play that has been sneaking up on us for decades, and it’s this reality that underpins How to See Like a Machine."

 Possible connection between Autonomous and human stuff.  This is intersects with the Amelia Jones stuff about portraiture (I think?) and the digital image stuff I've struggled to suss out/connect:  sort of Lev Manovich stuff about how images stop being "real" as soon as they're digital because of their manipulability (global; keystroke) and separation from the physical process Jones describes.  But also this isn't really so, at least so neatly:  digital images do/can come from letting in actual light through a physical lens; analog photographs were manipulable, etc.  But there *is a shift, especially in scale, which is what he's highlighting:  not *that images can be created by machines for machines, but that most of them (what is the field here? most images created? in a given year?  most images existing?) are.

Maybe also a connection to databending (which might be a way to de-nature seeing, if not see like a machine) (and so also interfaces) and ariella tal . 

 

see also artists mentioned in this piece:  https://www.hitosteyerl.net/#publications (images); Felicity Hammond, whose project Variations toured the UK last year 

 Note, and I think this is good:  If Gillian Wearing's work demonstrates why we should rethink a phobic response to synthetic images vis a vis their fakery, Felicity Hammond's describes why we should be fearful of their actual import. 

 Also:  autonomous-->machine vision-->paglen--->wearing. 

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