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PROPS 12 Vortex featuring Sougwen Chung.

#propspaper #sougwen #vortex #drawing #machine learning

PROPS 12 Vortex featuring Sougwen Chung.

PROPS: What is the role of images in your research?

Sougwen Chung: The role of images in my research is linked to ways in which interface design shapes image-making. For years I've had an interest in exploring how an interface operates as a layer of mediation in creative process.

My practice is motivated by a curiosity regarding this layer of mediation, of “being on the boundary”. This approach is part of a philosophy of making that speaks to the aesthetics of the near-future, inherently and by extension. It does so through the mediums of performance, installation, and moving image. The fields of human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are complex, involving layers of computational abstractions and a technical lexicon often inaccessible to people outside of their respective research areas. As such, the fields benefit from a narrative context to communicate their significance to a wider audience. One such context has been in the arena of competitive game-play. The narrative of games provides cultural reach as well as defined parameters of success. Watson, AlphaGo, and Libratus are centerpieces around which computational abstractions of human computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and machine learning can assemble. However, the easy communicability of competition reinforces the adversarial dynamic of human vs machine already prevalent in popular cultural discourse.

My recent project, Drawing Operations, presents an alternative. In Drawing Operations, I engage in a drawing performance with a robotic arm as an exploration of human and machine collaboration. The co-creation of an image between human and machine reframes the conventional narrative assigned to artificial intelligence. It sets the stage for a broader cultural understanding of the field and posits a different set of research goals. Conceptually, collaboration extends the interaction of human and machine to that of a creative partnership (however aspirationally). Additionally, it invites the subjective assessment of an audience as well as inspiring research goals defined by aesthetics, interaction, and craft. The role of images, in this case, creates space for comprehensive exploratory narratives to emerge. (Sometimes counterpoint, sometimes polyphony.) AI Researcher Fei-Fei Li says that if we want machines to think, we need to teach them to see. In addition to teaching machines how to see, as we speculate upon modes of vision and cognition dissimilar to our own, we are also teaching them what to see.

Drawing Operations

In Drawing Operations, the role of images is two-fold. As input, they are firing the synapses of the machine which cause it to move. As output, they are objects of aesthetic inquiry.

Input: Behaviour & Process

The behavior of the machine is driven by learning algorithms trained on images from a variety of sources. These images are derived from art historical archives as well as the works of contemporary artists. By using computer vision, video analytics, and machine learning, I interpret contemporary and historical image sets to glean meaningful gestural behaviour. From there, these behaviors are taken into the context of a collaborative performance. Within this collaboration, Drawing Operations aims to showcase a confluence of biological and mechanical modes of sensing, cognizing, interpreting, and mark-making.

Output: Aesthetics

“When the image is new, the world is new.” The speculative nature of the project is advanced by the interoperability of visual artifacts as concrete representations of research, sites of aesthetic comprehension, and objects within themselves. (The wreck and not the story of the wreck, the thing itself and not the myth.) As aesthetic inquiry, what forms emerge as a result of human and machine collaboration? What new types of information can be encoded in a single image? How do unfamiliar aesthetics stimulate new ways of seeing, sensing and decoding in the viewer?

Conclusion

Today, the interface is not simply a mediating apparatus for creation but a speculative agent of co-creation. As a result, in projects like Drawing Operations, the role of the image is multifaceted. The image functions not only as an aesthetic object, but a visual artifact showcasing the intersection of artistic practice and machine learning. For me, the project's continued evolution teases at some creative possibilities of the near-future. Beyond traditional anthropocentrism, and towards a promiscuously inclusive array of cognizing agents — mechanical and biological, singular and composite, discovered and soon-to-be discovered.

More of Sougwen's work at sougwen.com.

#props #vortex #machine learning #drawing #sougwen

PROPS 11 Dry Salvages featuring Francois Lanusse.

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PROPS 11 Dry Salvages featuring Francois Lanusse.

#propspaper

PROPS: What is the role of images in your research?

Francois: To a cosmologist like me, imaging the night sky through powerful telescopes opens an invaluable yet indirect window into the content of our Universe. Why indirect? Because the billions of galaxies that we do observe are just the tip of the iceberg. They are sprinkled onto a massive underlying cosmic web of dark matter that, despite accounting for most of the total matter of the Universe, is completely invisible. Its presence is betrayed by its gravitational effects. In particular, very massive dark matter structures effectively act as gravitational lenses, distorting the images of objects located behind them, much like objects are distorted and magnified if you look at them through a magnifying glass. Although this lensing effect is generally very small, it is ubiquitous on the sky - virtually every galaxy that we see is actually being lensed by some amount.

This is where images play a crucial role in the science that I do. By taking images of millions of galaxies (and even billions in the near future) and precisely measuring their shapes, we can detect the deformations caused by gravitational lensing, and from there infer the distribution of dark matter. But with such a small effect, devil is in the details. Great care must be taken in the acquisition and processing of these images as to not introduce any additional deformations, which would otherwise bias our analysis down the road. In order to detect and correct for any errors in this delicate measurement process, we rely on complex simulations of galaxy images that aim to mimic as closely as possible how real galaxies would be observed by our telescopes.

And here enters machine learning. At the core of our simulations we use a generative neural network, a computer algorithm that can learn by itself how real galaxies are supposed to look like and can then "imagine" new galaxies for us, different from the one we presented it during training and yet similar in every respect. This procedure allows us to produce a rich set of life-like image simulations, which we can use to thoroughly and precisely test our measurement tools.

The beauty of this gravitational lensing effect is that by looking at images of galaxies, we can actually sense the unseen parts of the Universe. One of its most exciting applications is to investigate the nature of Dark Energy, a mysterious force that seems to be driving an accelerated expansion of the very fabric of the Universe.

Francois Lanusse is a cosmologist at Carnegie Mellon University. Most of his research has been focused on building image and signal processing tools for various applications in cosmology and astrophysics. More at flanusse.net.

#propspaper #ai #universe

PROPS 09 demo and die and demo and die featuring Prashast Thapan.

#propspaper #staticlagoon

PROPS 09 demo and die and demo and die featuring Prashast Thapan.

#propspaper #staticlagoon

Static Lagoon is a videogame powered by RestBox: the world's first cushioned entertainment system. Compatible with Oculus Rift.

PROPS 09 demo and die and demo and die featuring Prashast Thapan and his game, Static Lagoon.

#propspaper #staticlagoon

Guest Feature 09: Prashast Thapan

PROPS: What is the role of images in your research?

Prashast Thapan: During the Renaissance, paintings were windows to the world. Artists would spend hours staring at landscapes, using what they saw to create visual information with brushstrokes. Now, I feel like images have started to play the role of the landscape. Google image search, Shutterstock, and other resources have become reference material we can use to inform our work. Sites like Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram are reservoirs of such images that influence us daily. When making video games, images are translated from reservoirs of inspiration into something else entirely.

Video games are inspired by real life. I can't build a world out of thin air—I need a point of reference to build something new. For my game Static Lagoon, I was focusing on the concept of alienation, or breaking the fourth wall. I was reading about the theatrical techniques of Berthold Brecht, who was ideologically opposed to Aristotle's idea of immersive theatre. Instead of the Aristotelian method of letting the audience escape into the play's narrative, Brecht would employ techniques that would constantly remind the audience that they were watching a play, so they would observe it with critical distance. I wanted to use that idea in game design and make a video game that constantly said, "remember, you're playing a video game."

The visual relationship between Static Lagoon and Dogville is evident—two worlds without walls containing a bare minimum of objects. But the experience of a film is observational, in a video game you're constantly making decisions that affect your experience. In Static Lagoon, the decisions you make urge you to re-examine your relationship to escapist activities - going to the mall, drinking alcohol, eating food, and even playing video games. The absence of walls (which in the film served as a reminder of the interconnectedness of the town) in the game allows you to anticipate what’s next.

The beauty of translating images into video games is that games ask you to participate. Which means, by default, the image will cease to be an image if put into a game. It’s transformed into a waypoint, a world, or something else—that’s where the magic happens.

#propspaper

PROPS 08 XRAY BODIES featuring Lydia Kallipoliti.

#props #body #xray #lydia kallipoliti

PROPS 08 XRAY BODIES featuring Lydia Kallipoliti.

#props #xray #body #lydia kallipoliti

PROPS 08: Lydia Kallipoliti

PROPS: What is the role of images in your research?

Lydia Kallipoliti: Images have undeniably features, form and character, yet from the moment they are experienced, they are transformed and redesigned as in our minds. They always carry a composite story, half extracted from actual events and half recounted in the mind through a reconstructive impromptu narrative.

In our perturbed new world of “post-truth,” images can be powerful tools of battle. We are possibly in dire need of a new kind of imagery to announce events, to tell stories and to shape our reality. If every bit of fact is now designed, the role of design of images has, albeit unwittingly, expanded to more than shaping the aesthetic and experiential aptitudes of our daily existence. In many ways, the design of images as a form of resistance has acquired civilizational value. It needs to narrate the silent unspoken curvature and shape of space itself, unearth the bedrock of the post-truth era, rendering visible an invisible battle of human displacement and disembowelment of livelihood.

#props #lydia kallipoliti #xray #body

Guinea Pigs

PROPS 08 XRAY BODIES featuring Lydia Kallipoliti.

Guinea Pigs was an installation by Lydia Kallipoliti and Andreas Theodoridis for the Istanbul Design Biennial in 2016 in response to the curators’ question “Are We Human.”

Guinea Pigs presented five species of engineered bodies: AMPHIBIAN MAN, EXOSKELETAL MAN, EXCREMENT MAN, FEEDBACK MAN and WEIGHTLESS MAN. A three-dimensional immersive projection narrated the stories of these figures, as fictional characters offset from the texture of reality; like the living ghosts of archival research. In parallel, each Guinea Pig, was presented in narrative texts, archival material, and patent drawings suspended from the ceiling and observed from a designated station on the floor, enabling the visitor to lie down and assume a horizontal position in the exhibition space. The change of posture from vertical to horizontal turns the viewer him/herself into a guinea pig, into an object that is observed, monitored and documented by the curators.

#props #xray #body

Game face on for 2017.

Altering features with H-WR. Hyungkoo Lee. 2007.

#hyungkoo lee #props

PROPS 07 Poly-Plasmic-Politics featuring Leopold Lambert.

#propspaper #graphic #design

TWO IMAGES FROM PALESTINE: ONE FROM THE PRESENT, ONE FROM THE FUTURE.

In my research, I am interested in images, not as mere illustrations but, rather in their potentiality to act as evidence. By this, I do not mean that images reveal the truth of a situation but, rather, that they can bring some matter to a subjective and political interpretation of reality: a truth if we may say. On November 27, 2013 Palestinian photographer, Muhmmad ‘Awad working for Israeli NGO B’Tselem, took a series of photographs while he was being targeted by an Israeli soldier who shot a tear gas canister directly at him. The photographs show the canister leaving the soldier’s weapon and sequentially reaching the photographer. It has been seen in the past that an expressive photograph can touch a vast amount of people; however, the emotion triggered by it is often misplaced, overwhelming the attention on the effect of a situation — Phan Thi Kim Phuc burnt by the American napalm in Vietnam is a quintessential example — rather than on its structural causes. Many individual tragedies in Palestine have thus created a sincere emotion thanks to a visual document (we can think of the photos of Rachel Corrie killed by an Israeli army bulldozer in 2003 for instance), yet this emotion and its punctuality never challenge the status quo. This photograph of the tear gas canister ‘slowly’ and coldly reaching its author is less emotional but, for this same reason, succeeds to express something broader. In this case, the invisible photographer with whom the viewer identifies is no longer the voyeur in a situation that does not concern him/her, (s)he is the body attacked. The viewer can therefore identify to this precarious position. In the contrary of many war photographs, this one also refuses any other aesthetics than the one of the event itself, unfolding within its frame. This absence of any other dramatic conditions reflects the situation in its coldness, and therefore no longer addresses the punctuality of an event but, rather, the continuity of the occupation, experienced on a daily basis by the bodies subjected to it. The ability of an image to act as evidence also allows us to produce evidence by producing images. This is not to say that we should manufacture a reality in the way a hoax operates but, rather, that we can trigger political imaginaries through this production. A recent work for which I was lucky to be commissioned by curators Mai Kanaaneh and Nadia Jaglom for an exhibition about the future(s) of Palestine addresses this potentiality. When producing the images of my work (postcards and maps from a post-Apartheid Palestine), I wanted to introduce an additional degree of subjectivity in the way we read them as evidence of this future. The images I therefore exhibited were photographs of these documents with hands visibly holding them. Through the additional degree of subjectivity brought by these photographs of “excavated objects of a future Palestine,” viewers were thus able to immerse themselves in this political imaginary, in the same way than a novel or a film would.

Léopold Lambert is an architect[e], writer, editor, and podcaster based in Paris and New York. He is the editor-in-chief of The Funambulist Magazine, as well as its blog, and its podcast Archipelago. His published work Weaponized Architecture The Impossibility of Innocence (dpr-barcelona 2012) examines the inherent characteristics of architecture that systematically makes it a political weapon in general, and also more specifically in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. More of his work at thefunambulist.net.

#propspaper #leopold lambert #the funambulist #photography #images

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