What do you see?-Panoramic
2023
Facial reconition software, respberry pie,3D printed deer skull
2023
Facial reconition software, respberry pie,3D printed deer skull
This self-trained, AI–generated video is a study in the circulation of sight at the Field Museum. The artist’s own photographs of taxidermied animals at the museum were used to train the AI. Informed by John Berger’s text on the animal gaze, the work suggests that the museum display is both an attempt to arrest a particular “look” of the animal, while in fact emptying out the once bidirectional act of seeing between animals and humans. The animals look back and there is no reciprocity.
Training an AI model on the artist’s images of dead animals, the work displaces this line of questioning to the experience of an artificial eye. How does an AI see? What does it learn from images of once living, now perpetually unseeing animals? The image data is processed to form a simulation of vision, and through the output of a model “making its own films,” the video simulates the mediation of looking between species, the species and its dead body, and biological vision and computation.
The resultant videos circulate within a field of undecidability: museum archive, machine hallucination, the politics of display. In their circulation, the work shows the dislocation of the object of the gaze and sight itself into a process of loss, translation, and re-animation
Training an AI model on the artist’s images of dead animals, the work displaces this line of questioning to the experience of an artificial eye. How does an AI see? What does it learn from images of once living, now perpetually unseeing animals? The image data is processed to form a simulation of vision, and through the output of a model “making its own films,” the video simulates the mediation of looking between species, the species and its dead body, and biological vision and computation.
The resultant videos circulate within a field of undecidability: museum archive, machine hallucination, the politics of display. In their circulation, the work shows the dislocation of the object of the gaze and sight itself into a process of loss, translation, and re-animation