From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ (Pictures and Labels)

For a 2019 commission in the Barbican’s Curve Gallery in London, I took a close look at the most widely-used “training set” used in AI – ImageNet, a database of over 14 million images organized into more than twenty-thousand categories.

The installation was made out of approximately 30,000 individually printed photographs, showing the precarious relationships between images and labels in a kind of extended homage to Magritte’s “Treachery of Images” for the age of machine learning.  

Installation view, From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ (Pictures and Labels) – Selections from the ImageNet dataset for object recognition, Barbican Centre – The Curve, London (September 2019 – February 2020)
Installation view, From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ (Pictures and Labels) – Selections from the ImageNet dataset for object recognition, Barbican Centre – The Curve, London (September 2019 – February 2020)
Installation view, From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ (Pictures and Labels) – Selections from the ImageNet dataset for object recognition, Barbican Centre – The Curve, London (September 2019 – February 2020)
Installation view, From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ (Pictures and Labels) – Selections from the ImageNet dataset for object recognition, Barbican Centre – The Curve, London (September 2019 – February 2020)