The works on this page were spurred by an invitation to submit images for Mohammed Salemy's participation in the 11th Gwangju Biennale 2016, FOR MACHINE USE ONLY included an installation of printed images and publication.
excerpt from invitation to submit:
“For Machine Use Only” is a curatorial experiment based on the idea of art making by humans “for”, and “in collaboration with”, machines. As the unstoppable proliferation of images pushes us closer to the outsourcing of the interpretation of images to intelligent machines, audience considerations will sooner or later will have to move beyond humans and must include non-human cognitive demands. Much like scripts, emoticons and hashtags, images are in the process of becoming a common language for machine-human and machine-machine communication.
In an ever-growing number of contemporary art exhibitions, the curatorial and display strategies are already being geared more towards the show's photographic documentation than its first hand biophenomenological experience by humans. Similarly, if not more pointedly, “For machines Use Only” tasks the participating artists with thinking rigorously about how their artistic production is seen and understood as flat surfaces by machines.
For this exhibition, which will be held during the Vienna Art Week 2014 (Nov 17-23) at Schneiderei Gallery (http://seeyounextthursday.com/), a select group of artists have been asked to submit a digital images documenting their artworks. Those working in photography may submit photographic works or frames from their video or film works. The exhibition will then be created by running a reverse image search submissions with a number of resulting images being displayed in the gallery space. There will also be a catalogue for the exhibition, which will include several short texts by theorists, philosophers, critics, artists and curators about machinic vision and the inhuman future of the image."
REVERSED ELEPHANT
For the call I chose to start with an image of an elephant poached for its ivory tusks. I photoshopped the image to create a stereoscopic effect. Using Google Reverse images, I searched results of my edited image. Initially the results were mostly comprised of red pick-up trucks in muddy terrains and other pictures that appeared to match abstraction of the image to a color pixellation. Over time, the image results shifted to depictions of elephants, dead and alive. The shift of images may have been a result of google reverse images codes searching both pixels and names of files used for the reverse search. This is my assumption.
Through hours spent looking at this imagery and playing with AI, I came to realize how much the images were affecting me. The horrific subject matter I was viewing, reading about, and working with had no impact on the intelligence of the machine. Machines are disinterested, unlike human beings.
Though the project for Machine Use Only consisted of only five images taken from google, the project I started culminated in videos made for a future automated intelligence, speculating that one day machines can be empathetic. The overall body of this project is currently incomplete.
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