Benjamin Grosser: Computers Watching Movies
Artist(s):
Title:
- Computers Watching Movies
Exhibition:
Creation Year:
- 2013
Medium:
- Computational Video
Size:
- 15:10 min.
Category:
Artist Statement:
The heart of digital technologies is software, a human-designed structure for computation that gives these technologies agency and enables them to interact with others. I focus on the cultural, social, and political effects of software. What does it mean for human creativity when a computational system can paint its own artworks? How is an interface that foregrounds our friend count changing our conceptions of friendship? Why do we become emotionally attached to software systems and what does this attachment enable for those who made them? To examine questions like these, I construct interactive experiences, machines, and systems that make the familiar unfamiliar, revealing the ways that software prescribes our behavior and thus, how it changes who we are.
Computers Watching Movies shows what a computational system sees when it watches the same films that we do. The work illustrates this vision as a series of temporal sketches, where the sketching process is presented in synchronized time with the audio from the original clip. Viewers are provoked to ask how computer vision differs from their own human vision, and what that difference reveals about our culturally-developed ways of looking. Why do we watch what we watch when we watch it? Will a system without our sense of narrative or historical patterns of vision watch the same things? In this way, the work seeks to reveal the hidden ways that culture is automating human vision.
Technical Information:
Media Used: computational video.
