Guest talk: machine vision and operational aesthetics

Welcome to this online guest talk by Dr Aubrey Anable and Dr Gloria Chan Sook Kim on "Edging into View: Machine Vision Interfaces and Operational Aesthetics”. It is organised by DARC with support from CUPRA research program and with additional assistance from Environmental Media and Aesthetics program.

• Date: May 19, 15.00-16.15
• Venue: online at https://aarhusuniversity.zoom.us/j/61286160008

Abstract:

Edging into View: Machine Vision Interfaces and Operational Aesthetics
With the integration of AI into most commercial digital platforms that we use, a set of emerging design techniques raise new questions about digital aesthetics. Animated ellipses signify to us that a chat bot is cognating, ChatGPT’s fade-in typewriter effect reveals its results as if being composed before us, the soft blue aura of Google Lens delineates the edges of detected objects, the undulating glow of Siri’s orb says “Go ahead, I’m listening,” and Apple Visual Look Up’s haptic cues and light animations present the work of machine vision. These interfaces are examples of operational aesthetics and the broader operational imaginary. They present the work of computation and how we are meant to perceive it. This talk considers how the work of objectness and saliency algorithms are presented to us by machine vision interfaces. 

When machine vision turns to face you and show you its work, it invites your interest in the most basic sense: it asks for your attention. Looking closely at Apple's Visual Look Up interface, its haptic cues and animated light sequences, we consider how it mediates between machine vision and human perception. The cues and animations present already-completed object detection tasks as durational visual performances, which encode problematic assumptions equating vision with attention and information scanning. Tap, pulse, scan: A split-second haptic pulse and wave of light let us know it’s working. The interface seems to say “Look! I’m doing it, I’m scanning.” Kim and Anable bring their perspectives as scholars of visual culture to the close analysis of these aesthetics, arguing that everyday interfaces reveal how machine vision systems shape cultural consensus about seeing, while also creating spaces for looking askance at them. 

Speaker Biographies
Aubrey Anable is a scholar of visual culture and Associate Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and co-editor of A Concise Companion to Visual Culture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2021). Her latest work on machine learning, video games, and epistemology will be published later this year in the journal Media Theory.

Gloria Chan Sook Kim is an interdisciplinary scholar working in the areas of computation and culture, environmental humanities, and visual culture. She is Associate Professor of Media and Culture at the University of California-Riverside. Kim is the author of Microbial Resolution: Visualization and Security in the Era of Emerging Microbes (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) as well as of numerous journal articles. She has been awarded multiple fellowships from organizations including the American Council of Learned Societies, The Mellon Foundation, and the Society for Humanities at Cornell University.