The relation between technological development and the art field should not be reduced to a linearly causal one. Technology impacts the art field. But a closer look at the underlying infrastructure of digital platforms should convince us that the methods and functions we tend to associate with the art world are operating at a deeper level in the formation of the techniques powering social media. Machines become slowly able to emulate human curation or reframe artistic creation because software itself is increasingly a product of curation. Technology is able to unsettle art practices and institutions because it is itself deeply informed by the very practices it attempts to emulate and surpass.
Computer vision offers a canonical example of how curation is operationalised in the production of seeing agents and machine interpretation of visual content. The creation of datasets, the collections of images used to train algorithms, are a case in point. More than mathematics, the frenetic acquisition of image collections and development of concepts aimed at rendering the visual world algorithmically tractable have provoked a qualitative jump in machine vision. Curation, image interpretation, aesthetics have become epistemic problems for computer scientists. Methods that traditionally pertained to art historians, curators or artists are mobilised to produce technological knowledge. And this knowledge in turn powers the platforms that reshape the art institution.
What is at stake in this entanglement is a new distribution of the sensible (Rancière, 2000), of what it means to “think, see and sense through the digital” (Lund, 2022).
My research proposal is situated in the frame of investigative aesthetics that inquires into the construction of the means of sensing (Fuller and Weizman, 2021, p39). I am interested in the emergence of hybrid practices exploring the ongoing re-distribution of the sensible, to research the conditions for the emergence of such practices in the art field, and their potential to question visual sense-making in the digital lifeworld. My research concentrates on controversies opposing artists and machine vision scientists, as well as practical projects that challenge the process of elaboration of computer vision. I want to focus on the circumstances under which an art field in transformation offers an epistemic platform to actors and projects that affect the course of the societal reality of scientific development. And how they affect the artistic institution in return.
References
Fuller, M. and Weizman, E. (2021) Investigative Aesthetics. London/New York: Verso.
Lund, J. (2022) Artistic Practice Under Contemporary Conditions. Available from: cc.au.dk/en/contemporarypractice/about [Accessed 30 March 2022].
Rancière, J. (2000) Le partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique, Hors collection. Paris: La Fabrique Éditions. Available from: https://www.cairn.info/le-partage-du-sensible--9782913372054.htm
