2019
the NOISY IMAGES exhibition at the Rautenstrauch-Joest museum in Cologne with Photoszene Köln
video of the installations NOISY IMAGES and The Recognition Machine (with ICV – Michael Murtaugh)
Troubled Archives are: Antje Van Wichelen, Rokia Bamba, Loes Jacobs, Peggy Pierrot, Brenda Bikoko
here, you will find a link to download the PDF for free:
https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5687/The-Perception-MachineOur-Photographic-Future
The Recognition Machine is treated between pp 114-117
here is the abstract by MIT:
The MIT Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14471.001.0001
ISBN electronic: 9780262376631
Publication date: 2023
A provocative investigation of the future of photography and human perception in the age of AI.
We are constantly photographing and being photographed while feeding machine learning databases with our data, which in turn is used to generate new images. Analyzing the transformation of photography by computation—and the transformation of human perception by algorithmically driven images, from CGI to AI—The Perception Machine investigates what it means for us to live surrounded by image flows and machine eyes. In an astute and engaging argument, Joanna Zylinska brings together media theory and neuroscience in a Vilém Flusser–Paul Virilio remix. Her “perception machine” names a technical universe of images and their infrastructures. But it also refers to a sociopolitical condition resulting from today’s automation of vision, imaging—and imagination.
Written by a theorist-practitioner, the book incorporates Zylinska’s own art projects, some of which have been co-created with AI. The photographs, collages, films, and installations available as part of the book (and its companion website) provide a different mode of thinking about our technological futures, at a local as well as a planetary level. Offering provocative concepts such as eco-eco-punk, AUTO-FOTO-KINO, planetary micro-vision, loser images, and sensography, the book outlines an existential philosophy of messy media for a time when our practices of imaging and self-imaging are being radically redesigned. Importantly, it also offers a new vision of our future.
The Recognition Machine has been a welcome guest in the huge corridor of Brussels’ cultural gem Cinema Nova.
In the age of facial recognition, here’s a machine that questions some of our anthropometric practices. Similar to a photo booth, the “recognition machine” invites visitors to take a photo of themselves. The photo activates an algorithm that attempts to establish links between the recorded pixels and those in a database of images of 19th-century colonized people. Then the machine prints your portrait with the faces the algorithm associates it with. A disturbing experiment that links contemporary surveillance regimes with those of a colonial past. A QR code leads you to the colonial database and an invitation to comment.
The Recognition Machine is a creation by artists Antje Van Wichelen and Michael Murtaugh, backed by the collectives Troubled Archives and ICV.
https://recognitionmachine.vandal.ist
things can go wrong with a blog. this blog lost its posts from between 2019 and 2024. we quickly try to put some highlights back up here.
The project New Hero(ïn)es kicks off with a day of mutual portrait photography and conversation between the members of the Troubled Archives collective. We apply the 19th Century collodion technique on ourselves. The last photo of the day is a creation by the master himself, Silvano Magnone; a group portrait of the Troubled Archives collective.
In preparation of the work Vitrine#5 : Deconstructing by nature, Loes and I went out into the sun to get some Rhein wasser that will help us deconstruct some colonial images. The images I re-filmed and developed on 16mm film for this work are 19th Century photographs from the Rautenstrauch-Joest museum archive that illustrate the unequal power relations between colonizers and colonized.
The work itself is on display at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Köln, in Blickpunkt, until July 21st 2019.
NOISY IMAGES in Köln 5/5 – 16/6
The exhibition NOISY IMAGES investigates the mechanisms of colonial photography with four installations that result from Antje Van Wichelens research on colonial photo archives of institutions such as Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, Quai Branly, Africa Museum Tervuren, Wereldculturen.nl, Pitt Rivers Museum, etc. The works presented are realised in close collaboration with Rokia Bamba (sound installation for Noisy Images), Michael Murtaugh & Nicolas Maleve (co-created The Recognition Machine), Loes Jacobs (nadine – production), architect Jonathan Haehn, and curator Lucia Halder.
NOISY IMAGES opens on Sunday 5 May at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, in the framework of the Photoszene Festival in Cologne and can be visited until 16 June.
more info: nadine.be, festival.photoszene.de
Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum – Cäcilienstr. 35, 50676 Cologne Germany
NOISY IMAGES is supported by Vlaamse Gemeenschap, Rautenstrauch Joest Museum, Photoszene Festival, Workspace Brussels, Gemeente Elsene, Constant vzw, LABO BXL, L’abominable, Moleskine, and nadine vzw,.
A video impression of the fourth and cosiest debate of the series.
21C/19C_Procedures for Anthropometric Image Reversal is a performative 16mm film work on the painful colonial archive, specifically the anthropometric photography of 1860-1900. read more…