Paper short abstract:

A mix of talk and screening of excerpts from the experimental feature film Acapulco, directed by Bruno Moreschi during 2023/2024 at the Collegium Helveticum, in Zurich. The film tests different methodologies to expand the possibilities of using datasets that train Computer Vision.

Paper long abstract:

The emergence of computer vision also coincides with the dissemination of Large Scale Vision Datasets (LSVDs). In these datasets everything is intricate: millions of amateur images taken without consent from social media; low resolution files; a strong presence of scenes related to US culture etc. All this organized from precarious labor carried out by thousands of anonymous microworkers on platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk. Challenged by such opacity, I decided not to argue that these datasets are simple black boxes and act in a purposeful and collaborative way. I created a long-term methodological practice for a deeper understanding of these images. During the pandemic and social isolation, I began to invite people directly or indirectly related to images, technology and/or arts to receive 3 postcards by mail with the images – now in print. With images now materialized and more individualized than in the LSVDs, I established countless exchanges and conversations with the “seers”. The result was more than 40 hours of recordings and other types of feedback received (such as drawings, texts, sounds, etc.). This is valuable material for understanding these images in depth and in a non-normative/commercial way. The result of this research culminated in the film Acapulco. In my presentation I intend to show excerpts from the film in a kind of experimental lecture.