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Arts & Communication Computer vision in tactical AI art

with a “porny” allusiveness. This work encapsulates the
problem of AI-powered Internet censorship (e.g., through
content filtering on social media), which has wide-reaching
consequences for the freedom of creative expression and
the overall variety and character of cultural production.
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Another Elwes’ generative video, Closed Loop (2017),
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keeps the CV biometry algorithms “at home” by establishing
a loop between a mutually feeding text-to-image and
image-to-text model, whose inaccuracies and biases imply
the applied AI’s ethical issues in a wittily unpredictable
continuum. 8
Shinseungback Kimyonghun’s installation Mind
(2019) uses FER+ Emotion Recognition annotation and
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ONNX Runtime scoring engine for the emotion analysis of Figure 7. Shinseungback Kimyonghun, Mind (2010). Installation view.
the last hundred gallery visitors’ facial expressions to drive Photograph: Shinseungback Kimyonghun. Courtesy of the artists
fifteen ocean drums that generate an impressive minimalist
soundscape with an overhead camera as a single indicator involved the Mexican government, police forces, and drug
of the machinic gaze (Figure 7). cartels. When the visitor steps in front of a screen with
an overhead camera, the CV software tracks their face
Some works, such as Zach Blas’ Facial Weaponization
Suite (2011 – 2014) and Face Cages (2015 – 2016), aim to and finds the image of a student with the best matching
facial features. The student’s image is displayed together
protect privacy with practical solutions that obstruct facial with the matching accuracy or the “level of confidence.”
recognition algorithms, while others, such as Avital Meshi’s Lozano-Hemmer intentionally used the same biometric
Classification Cube (2019), Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace’s surveillance algorithms that the military and police
Exposing.ai (2021), or Coralie Vogelaar’s Random String typically use to look for suspects: Eigen, Fisher, and LBPH.
of Emotions (2018), provide estheticized deconstructions
of automated emotion analysis. For instance, in Random Comparably, Mushon Zer-Aviv’s The Normalizing
String of Emotions (2018), Vogelaar’s software generated Machine (since 2018) places its recursive critique of
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a set of her portraits based on a random chain of temporal normative statistics and automated biometric classification
visual segments that constitute a facial expression. An within a historical context (Figure 8). This installation’s
emotion recognition program then analyzed the portraits visitors face a serial line-up of pairs of previously recorded
and assigned them the percentages for six basic emotions: visitors and point out the one that looks more “normal.”
happy, sad, angry, surprised, scared, and disgusted. The Their portraits, captured during this process, are added
resulting book presents all tagged portraits whose complex to the training dataset, and their selection decisions
but non-existing emotional configurations underline the modify a generative model that continuously visualizes
mechanistic nature and implicit absurdities of statistical the facial aggregate of “normalcy” in a separate image.
models used for expression recognition and classification. The Normalizing Machine adopts the methodology and
esthetics of Alphonse Bertillon, the French forensics
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s commemorative work Level
of Confidence (2015) emphasizes the somber aspects pioneer who developed a system for standardizing,
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indexing, and categorizing human faces in the late 1800s.
of facial recognition. This interactive setup matches The installation setup also includes references to Alan
visitor’s faces with the portraits of 43 students from the Turing, who arguably hoped that AI would transcend the
Ayotzinapa Normalista school in Iguala, Mexico, who systemic bias that criminalized his deflection from the
were kidnapped and most likely mass-murdered and sexual norm. 9
incinerated in an incident on September 26, 2014, which
In influencing and determining our ways of seeing and
8 This work’s elegant concept and methodology, which decision-making, modern AI relies on data retrospection
Elwes reused in A.I. Interprets A.I.: Interpreting “Against
Interpretation” (Sontag 1966) (2023), were cloned by 9 After being celebrated for his contributions to Britain’s
Theodoros Papatheodorou and Jack DiLaure’s Visual cryptographic counterintelligence in World War II, Turing
Dialogues (2023), which invites the visitor to submit a hand was arrested for homosexual activity in 1952. To evade
drawing to initiate the loop between the prompt-based CLIP the prison sentence, he chose to undergo estrogen therapy
for image-to-text and Stable Diffusion for text-to-image which caused him to develop female bodily characteristics,
conversion. become depressive, and allegedly commit suicide in 1954.

Volume 2 Issue 3 (2024) 8 doi: 10.36922/ac.2282