Megalith

One of the earliest tasks that neural networks and Artificial Intelligence could do reliably well was to recognize written numbers. These sorts of number-recognition systems are ubiquitous, as anyone who’s ever had an ATM automatically read the handwritten numbers of a deposited check knows. Megalith is made out of nearly 70,000 handwritten digits that represent one of the original collections of images that number-recognition systems were built upon. I think of this piece as a kind of Rosetta stone, an interface between two languages: that of written human numbers, and the language of artificial intelligence. But in this piece, the “translation” is an invisible, machinic interpretation of these numbers, and is inaccessible to our human senses.