Join us on Wednesday May 1st, 15.00-17.00, at Borough Road Gallery (103 Borough Road, LSBU) for a presentation by Joanna Zylinska entitled The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI. All welcome.
Today, we are not only constantly photographing but are also being photographed by machines of various dimensions and scales. All these images are feeding machine-learning databases, which are then used to generate new images. We are also being constantly observed, by human and mechanical eyes. Drawing on the material from her latest book, in her talk Joanna Zylinska will propose that we now find ourselves living in what she calls ‘the perception machine’. Describing a technical universe of images and their infrastructures, the perception machine names a sociopolitical condition resulting from the automation of vision and imaging. But it also serves as a description of a large-scale universe of images and imagination. Outlining a planetary philosophy of ‘after-photography’, Zylinska’s talk will include a presentation of several of her art projects that accompany the book, from a feminist take on the drone to the remake of a Chris Marker’s La Jetée.
Joanna Zylinska is an artist, writer, curator, and Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King’s College London. She is also a member of Creative AI Lab, a collaboration between King’s and Serpentine Galleries. Zylinska is an author of a number of books, including AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (Open Humanities Press, 2020, open access) and Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press, 2017). An advocate of ‘radical open-access’, she is an editor of the MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW book series for Open Humanities Press. Her art practice involves experimenting with different kinds of image-based media. In 2013 she was Artistic Director of Transitio_MX05 ‘Biomediations’, the biggest Latin American new media festival, which took place in Mexico City. She is currently researching perception and cognition as boundary zones between human and machine intelligence, while trying to figure out what art ‘after AI’ will look like. Her latest book, The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI, came out from the MIT Press in November 2023 (open access). IG: @joanna.zylinska
Shared reading to stimulate discussion: Chapter 1 of The Perception Machine, Does Photography Have a Future? (Does Anything Else?).
Image courtesy of Joanna Zylinska, first published in cura magazine 2023.