I’m currently developing a project that involves applying computer vision techniques to historical films. My goal is to tease out the language of algorithmic vision in order to understand how it is augmenting, superseding, and altering human vision.
If we understand vision to be not only an innate cortical function, but also a social discipline, interwoven with language, technology, and networks of power, we must admit that this abstract field, which defines our primary sensory interpretation of the world, is rapidly undergoing a fundamental rupture – at the same transformative scale as the invention and development of the camera from the 16th to 20th centuries. This time, however, the rupture is operating at an exponential increase of speed, precipitated by the algorithmic processing power on which it runs.
Feature image credit:
Benjamin Grosser’s Computers Watching Movies series
This is a still frame his program generated as it was watching The Matrix.