Machine Vision (2015 - present)

Whilst the photographic image has become a ubiquitous feature of digital culture, it has undergone far-reaching transformations through computational systems.

Machine Vision - a scrawled patent drawing of a doll

Machine Vision (2015 - present)

Whilst the photographic image has become a ubiquitous feature of digital culture, it has undergone far-reaching transformations through computational systems.

Whilst the photographic image has become a ubiquitous feature of digital culture, it has undergone far-reaching transformations through computational systems. This has meant that understandings of the photograph in culture are radically different from understandings of the photographic image as data.

In partnership with the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, London South Bank University, we appointed Nicolas MalevĂ© as a Doctoral Researcher in 2015 to further unpack how machines see the world, exploring the politics behind processes of image annotation, and identifying the challenges it poses for photographic culture. Nicolas Malevé’s thesis “Algorithms of Vision: Human and machine learning in computational visual culture” will be published in 2021, and draws upon an early experiment conducted in 2007 at Caltech by Fei Fei Li, initiator of ImageNet, one of the most popular visual datasets.

It offers a map of the entanglement of computer vision and photography and documents, Variations on a Glance, a series of re-enactments Nicolas staged in the Gallery and elsewhere, based on the Caltech experiment in order to generate new questions concerning the politics, labour and temporality of decoding images for machines.
 

Selected Projects, Talks & Publications

Horizontal Humans (2 Oct 2015-10 Jan 2016), A commissioned Media Wall project by ScanLAB Projects

Nicolas Maleve (2016) Contours of the discontinuous in: Loose Associations 2.2

Nicolas Maleve (2016): “The cat sits on the bed”, Pedagogies of vision in human and machine learning

Search by Image, live (Lena/Fabio) by Sebastian Schmeig (7 October 2016 - 29 January 2017. A commissioned Media Wall Project 

Nicolas Maleve & Katrina Sluis: Curating Machines lecture series. 

Katrina Sluis (2017) Machine Literacies in the Photographic Museum, Ways of Machine Seeing Symposium, Cambridge University, CoDE and Cambridge Big Data, 26 – 28 Jun

Geoff Cox (2016) Ways of Machine Seeing

Decision Space, an online commission by Sebastian Schmeig (7 Oct 2016 - 5 Feb 2017) For further documentation, see: http://decision-space.com

Robot Vision Geekender (2016), featuring work by Katriona Beales, Terence Broad, Luba Elliott, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ryo Ikeshiro, Carlos Molinero, 3D Scanbot, Foxall Studio,  South Bank Collective & Superflux

Nicolas Maleve & Sebastian Schmieg (2017) The politics of image search - A conversation with Sebastian Schmieg in: Unthinking Photography. 

Nicolas Maleve (2019): An introduction to image datasets in: Unthinking Photography

Gaia Tedone (2019) From Spectacle to Extraction. And All Over Again in: Unthinking Photography

Data/Set/Match programme, which includes: 

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