Gabriele de Seta presented "Imagi(ni)ng machine vision: An industry walkthrough.” Machine vision companies command more than a third of China’s huge artificial intelligence market. Products ranging from image recognition platforms to smart city solutions and from biometric identification systems to autonomous robots showcase the variety and global competitiveness of the Chinese machine vision industry. Chinese technologies are subjected to increased scrutiny around the globe, but how exactly is machine vision portrayed by Chinese companies, and what kind of imaginaries does the industry embrace for its different audiences? This Screen Walk borught the audience into a journey through websites, social media pages and user-generated content, delving into the visual tropes, cultural codes, and situated aesthetics of artificial intelligence products.

Screen Walks is a new series of live-streamed artist/researcher-led explorations of online spaces and artistic strategies designed to illuminate a thriving – often overlooked – digital cultural scene. A new online collaboration between The Photographers’ Gallery, UK and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland.

Gabriele de Seta is, technically, a sociologist. He holds a PhD from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taipei. Gabriele is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Bergen, where he is part of the ERC-funded project “Machine Vision in Everyday Life”. His research work, grounded on ethnographic engagement across multiple sites, focuses on digital media practices, sociotechnical entanglements and vernacular creativity in the Chinese-speaking world. He is also interested in experimental music, internet art, and collaborative intersections between anthropology and art practice.