Military culture is filled with a totemic visual language consisting of symbols and insignia that signify everything from various unit and command affiliations to significant events, and noteworthy programs. A typical uniform will sport patches identifying its wearer’s job, program affiliation, achievements and place within the military hierarchy. These markers of identity and program heraldryContinue reading “Symbology”
Category Archives: Pictures & Words
Code Names of the Surveillance State
I think of this endlessly scrolling video installation – composed from more than 4,000 National Security Agency (NSA) and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) surveillance program code names – as a kind of found poem crafted from the deliberately nonsensical names used for NSA surveillance programs. The project was first presented to coincide with the openingContinue reading “Code Names of the Surveillance State”
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 relationshipsContinue reading “From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ (Pictures and Labels)”
Training Humans
I conceptualized this exhibition with Kate Crawford to tell a story about the history of images used to ‘recognize’ humans in computer vision and AI systems. We weren’t interested in either the hyped, marketing version of AI nor the tales of dystopian robot futures. We wanted to engage with the materiality of AI, and toContinue reading “Training Humans”
The Trolls
As part of broader efforts to manage cyber bullying and online trolls, AI researchers are attempting to create algorithms that automatically detect what kinds of online content constitute “trolling.” This piece is made from a dataset designed to teach AI algorithms what kinds of language patterns are typical of online trolling. Viewers should be warnedContinue reading “The Trolls”
Hallucinations
One of the most common applications of Artificial Intelligence is to do automatic object-recognition and image-captioning. When you upload an image to Facebook or other social media, powerful Artificial Intelligence algorithms can recognize the identities of people in images, the objects, the products and even the places depicted in those images. AIs are taught howContinue reading “Hallucinations”
Machine-Readable Hito & Holly
These two pieces are made out of hundreds of portraits of artist Hito Steyerl and sound artist and composer Holly Herndon that have been analyzed by various facial-analysis algorithms. Below each picture is the output of algorithms attempting to detect their age, gender, and emotional state. Other algorithms attempt to determine whether they are wearingContinue reading “Machine-Readable Hito & Holly”
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 representContinue reading “Megalith”
A Dictionary of Volapük
In 1879 in Baden, Germany, Father Johann Martin Schleyer created a universal language at the behest of God, speaking to Schleyer in a dream. He called this new language Volapük or “World Speak.” Volapük was a simple language meant to give Catholic readers from different linguistic backgrounds an easier time reading aloud from the Bible.Continue reading “A Dictionary of Volapük”
Demonstration of Eating, Licking, and Drinking
This is one of my all-time favorite images. When I showed it to filmmaker Werner Herzog, he concurred and added that he believed it belonged “next to the Mona Lisa.” Demonstration of Eating, Licking, and Drinking was produced by a team of scientists at Cornell University to be included on the Voyager Golden Record, aContinue reading “Demonstration of Eating, Licking, and Drinking”