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Arts & Communication Computer vision in tactical AI art

modern AI’s socio-technical regimen, we trace their because it was difficult to access and use for most artists and
interrelated topics and imbricated critical points that the contemporaneous surveillance culture was dominated
reveal the info-capitalist suppression of AI technologies’ by analog imaging technologies. One of the noteworthy
social rootage and filtering human benefits from making exceptions is Suicide Box (1996) by the Bureau of Inverse
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and leveraging them, underline human roles behind AI’s Technology (Natalie Jeremijenko and Kate Rich), which
performative power, and expose human interests that tooled the CV for a provocative social critique. With a
drive social conflicts fueled by applied AI. This appraisal motion-sensitive video camera setup that recorded only
foregrounds artworks’ effectiveness in instigating apparent upon the detection of vertical motion, the artists covered
and practical (not hypothetical or speculative) changes the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco for 100 days to
in human relations, economy, and politics for a more just capture suicide jumpers. Finalized as an edited video of
and livable society. It considers CV-related critical art 17 registered incidents, the work stirred controversy at the
as a valuable tributary to the contemporary AI debate, 1997 Whitney Biennial. Other artists who worked with
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but its missed potentials and failures indicate tactical AI CV in the 1990s include Simon Penny, Toshio Iwai, Christa
art’s shared vulnerabilities whose improvements may Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, Camille Utterback
require reassessing the premises in the field’s theoretical and Romy Achituv, Scott Snibbe, and Marie Sester.
foundations.
The release of versatile CV programming libraries, such
2. CV in tactical AI art as OpenCV and Dlib in the early 2000s, and the successes
of data-driven ML technologies, pushed the limits of
Art is an inherently technological realm of human activity, digital image processing and gave artists more freedom
and optical tools are among its key topics and obsessions, and flexibility to work with object- or feature-recognition
especially in Western cultural tradition, so artists’ interest
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in machine vision is not surprising. The immediate pretext data extracted from pictures, videos, and live camera feeds.
for AI art practices with CV was set by the surveillance The following diversification of generative and interactive
art genre in the three closing decades of the 20 century. experiments that explored perception, behavior, and
th
Surveillance art emerged as a reaction to the proliferation cognition by interfacing humans with ML is illustrated
and steady improvements of visual technologies in the by a string of cogent, technically accomplished projects.
military, law enforcement, science, and business; the For instance, in the installation by Golan Levin and Greg
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global spread of CCTV and video satellite networks; and Baltus Opto-Isolator (2007), a wall-mounted box hosts a
the rising popularity of mediated everyday life in reality single mechatronic eye in the center and a camera pinhole
TV shows and on the Internet. Reinforcing the post- on the side. The box surface is reflexive so visitors can see
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structuralist social critique, these changes motivated themselves while interacting with the eye, whose uncanny
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artists to probe the burgeoning relationship between power feedback repertoire includes looking the viewer directly
and new vision technologies. They took various pathways in the eye, moving as if intently studying the viewer’s face,
using photography, film, video, installation, performance, looking away coyly if it is stared at for too long, or blinking
and the Internet to deconstruct and question voyeurism, precisely one second after the viewer (Figure 1). This is
indifference, control, reliability, accuracy, and other one of many artworks that use anthropomorphic premises
features and aspects of machine vision in the surveillance about machine vision to create the effect of inverted art
culture. 30-32 Although surveillance art had variable spectatorship by asking: “What if artworks could know
(arguably negligible) success in instigating noticeable how we were looking at them? And, given this knowledge,
sociopolitical changes, it was generally well received by the how might they respond to us?” 36
audience and academia and influenced the art world. Conversely and equally important, Seiko Mikami’s
Myron Krueger’s interactive installation Videoplace installation Desire of Codes (2010) underlines the
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(developed between 1969 and 1975) pioneered the abstract character of machinic perception. It consists
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use of CV in the mid-1970s, but this technology figured of 90 wall-mounted mechatronic devices, six ceiling-
in relatively few surveillance artworks before the 2000s suspended robotic arms equipped with cameras and
various sensors, and a semi-spherical screen composed
3 See, for example, Kubovy, STOA, and Witcombe. 27 of 61 hexagonal cells. These interactive sections provide
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4 Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish (first published
in 1975) has been one of the influential theoretical sources a complex, esthetically competent, although ultimately
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for visual arts. It analyzes the changes in Western penal counterintuitive experience for the visitors to “investigate
and social normative/disciplinary mechanisms (in schools, the forms of human corporeity and desire facilitated by
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hospitals, and the military) that the new technological powers surveillance technology and network society.” Related
of corporeal control introduced during the modern age. examples include Random International’s installation
Volume 2 Issue 3 (2024) 3 doi: 10.36922/ac.2282