A Cat, A Dog, A Microwave…

A publication on the cultural practices and politics of visual datasets

A book with the title 'A Cat, A Dog, A microwave'

A Cat, A Dog, A Microwave…

A publication on the cultural practices and politics of visual datasets

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Departing from the research by The Photographers’ Gallery digital programme, this book critically investigates the development and impact of visual datasets from the perspective of machine learning, while exploring their artistic possibilities in the contemporary image culture.

Visual datasets are large collections of images typically created by researchers to develop machine vision algorithms. These curated sets of digital photographs and videos have become an object of interest and concern also for artists, thinkers, and cultural institutions. A Cat, A Dog, A Microwave… brings together a broad range of associative perspectives from artists, computers scientists, curators and researchers to question the role played by photography when teaching machines how to see the world. The book maps a network of ideas and experiences on labour, identity, aesthetics, circulation, and control and their complex relationship with photographic notions of taxonomy and classification. Historical surveys, and specific case studies are brought together with experimental artistic practices to propose an imaginative perspective on photographic datasets.

A book with the title 'A Cat, A Dog, A microwave' An open book the back cover of a book a book open with a picture of sculptures of faces

Index of titles and contributors:

  • On the Photographic Imaginaries of AI: Ioanna Zouli in conversation with Katrina Sluis
  • Ways of Machine Seeing, by Geoff Cox
  • Working with Datasets, by Jon Uriarte
  • About Face, A Survey of Facial Recognition Datasets, by Genevieve Fried & Deborah Raji
  • Generative Representation, by Heather Dewey-Hagborg
  • Unevenly Distributed, by Florian A. Schmidt
  • Decision Space, Nicolas Malevé in conversation with Sebastian Schmieg
  • Recovering Lost Narratives, by xtine burrough & Sabrina Starnaman
  • On Lacework, by Everest Pipkin
  • The Age of ImageNet Discovery, by Alan Blackwell
  • From Spectacle to Extraction. And All Over Again, by Gaia Tedone
  • To look like a dataset; revisiting the Data/Set/Match project, by Nicolas Malevé.

With images of works by Anna Ridler, Philipp Schmitt, Mimi Onuoha, Heather Dewey-
Hagborg, Everest Pipkin, xtine burrough & Sabrina Starnaman and Sebastian Schmieg.

Edited by Nicolas Malevé & Ioanna Zouli, designed by Oficina de Disseny.

Information
ISBN: 978-1-9163487-2-1

Buy from The Photographers' Gallery
Distributed nationally through ArtData and internationally through Idea Books.

Highlights from the Digital Programme

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Unthinking Photography

Unthinking Photography is an online resource that explores photography's increasingly automated, networked life.

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Screen Walks

A series of live-streamed artist/researcher-led explorations of online spaces.

Everyone A white mouse

Research

Find a wealth of research projects, experiments in media and new thinking about the role of photography in a digital climate.

A graphic map over a pink and purple background, at the center of it there's a circle where it says 'less > more'. A great number of arrows depart from the circle to terms such as 'technologies', 'aesthetics' or 'communities and practices'.

The Image at the End of the World

The Image at the End of the World research strand analyses the photographic image as computational object, as data circulating within networks, and its ecological effects.