Paper short abstract:

white clouds in blue sky juxtaposes a performative engagement with the materiality of gallery refuse with the poetics and politics of AI and machine vision, where humans and machines increasingly mutually constitute, reinforce and rewrite classifications and meanings of things.

Paper long abstract:

white clouds in the blue sky is a three-channel video installation that juxtaposes a performative engagement with the materiality of gallery refuse with the poetics and politics of machine vision. The artists methodically construct a sculptural heap of utilitarian objects like stacks of chairs and scrap materials that have been gathered after an exhibition and are destined for the landfill. As they create and then deconstruct the pile of mundane and broken objects, these assemblages are interpreted by the DenseCap machine vision and description system, which is confounded in its attempts to accurately identify and interpret assemblages of objects created. This video work highlights tensions between individual human structures of memory and imagination, and contemporary computational image recognition systems. By drawing attention to current limitations of machine vision in recognizing and describing objects, the work points to significant possibilities and difficulties as humans and machines increasingly mutually constitute, reinforce and re-write classifications and meanings of things. How will machines read images and artworks in the future, and what stories will be told about them? What stories will humans be able to tell and imagine in the future, in relation to new intelligent storytelling machines? What kind of planet will we inhabit? Will the skies be blue? Will the clouds be white?