unthinking
photography

The second part of the interview between Sebastian Schmieg and Nicolas Malevé. Schmieg reflects on his project 'Search by Image' and further discusses machine learning and intelligence as well the politics of image annotation.

Nicolas Malevé interviews the artist Sebastian Schmieg on image annotation, immaterial labour and his TPG commission 'Decision Space'.

These (in)security cameras are all around us. In our streets, shops, buses, restaurants, homes. They are looking, listening and recording. Their omnipresent gaze pierces, protects us, keeps us safe. Through them we are delivered from unknown evils, from the nameless things that might creep up on us if we don’t watch out. Through their panopticon gaze we are quantified, verified, analysed, documented, mapped, filtered and judged.

“The truth is written all over our faces” was a tagline for Lie to Me, a procedural drama on network television several years ago.

“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”

A net-based work created entirely by algorithms that have been automatically collecting images of six surveillance cameras placed on the US/Mexico Border from 2011 until 2014.

The steadiness and endurance of the camera’s gaze produces the strong sense that the camera is something other than an extension of the eye: it is a sensor, a monitor, a machine for being with and in the world.

Photography of the Internet extends to unprecedented social fields and challenges of social norms for questioning cultural, economic and ethical values of photos circulating within the networks.

Our shares and likes, our annotations and social metadata are training a generation of AI agents. Everyday, we are already all teaching bots and algorithms how to look at images. If we consider the extent of our relationship with algorithms, we realise the magnitude of the effort of teaching and learning that is taking place.