Deep Hysteria is a still image series that repurposes algorithmic bias in the service of unraveli... more Deep Hysteria is a still image series that repurposes algorithmic bias in the service of unraveling a deep human bias. Artworks are generated using deep learning algorithms trained on still frames of thousands of YouTubers speaking to the camera. Generated individuals are then algorithmically gender-adjusted and the variations fed to Amazon Rekognition, a commercial deep learning based facial analysis algorithm (Amazon n.d.) that attempts to classify faces according to the subject's gender, age, and emotional appearance. Despite the marketing of such tools, reading emotions solely by analyzing a person's face is a feat that neither humans (Callahan 2021, Le Mau 2021) nor "AI's" (Crawford 2021) can reliably do. Further, these deep learning algorithms are themselves trained on data categorized by humans-so they reflect human biases. The side-by-side images in Deep Hysteria compare Rekognition's interpretation of similar expressions on more masculine and more feminine versions of the same face. The comparisons interrogate how humans perceive emotion differently, and often in alignment with stereotypes, when observing people of differing genders.
ISEA 22 Proceedings / Second Summit on New Media Archiving, 2022
The 20th century saw various approaches to expanded cinema performance, including color organs an... more The 20th century saw various approaches to expanded cinema performance, including color organs and mixed media "psychedelic" light shows. These practices were difficult to document technically and were, to various extents, based on performance in the moment. Technically, archival 20th century visual performance documentation and preservation ranges from the non-existent to the surprisingly future proofed. But expanded cinema historian William Moritz summed up the unrepeatability of performance experience in a 1969 review of the mixed media performance ensemble Single Wing Turquoise Bird: "always only once." Contemporary performative digital practice shares some parallels with these earlier performative practices: the work may be performed live by a performer, or an algorithm may perform the work automatically. In either case, preservation faces the paradox of recreating moments that were intended to happen "always only once." Examining 20th century attempts to preserve the ephemeral can inform not only how we approach preservation of performative and process-based digital works, but also which works we attempt to preserve.
Recent studies have demonstrated that algorithmic bias exhibited by neural networks can amplify h... more Recent studies have demonstrated that algorithmic bias exhibited by neural networks can amplify human bias and stereotyping in the interpretation of online content. But since algorithms determine public visibility of user-produced media content, algorithmic bias also has a curatorial role in determining whether content is seen by the public at all. This visibility bias has the potential to impact and amplify public perceptions of social media platforms and their content creators in aggregate. The internet livestream art project, What the Robot Saw, inverts this algorithmic bias by curating clips from among the least visible current YouTube videos, while using neural networks to playfully reinterpret the content itself. This paper describes What the Robot Saw and the cultural and social issues of neural net-based algorithms that surround it.
Amy Alexander and Curt Miller discuss mixed modal improvisation with their custom integrated soft... more Amy Alexander and Curt Miller discuss mixed modal improvisation with their custom integrated software systems PIGS (Alexander, visuals) and The Farm (Miller, sound.) In this free-flowing discussion, Alexander and Miller discuss historical visual, music and programming practices including abstract animation, graphic scores, and object-oriented programming. They discuss how these trajectories feed into the development of PIGS, a system designed to facilitate improvisation by using drums and visual controllers to perform structured visuals. The artists then discuss the specificities of mixed-modal collaborative improvisation, including the impact of representational content (algorithmically curated YouTube videos) on their responses as improvisers. They review responses to PIGS performances to date and discuss future plans for new PIGS performance context. They conclude with a discussion of PIGS as audiovisual performance research and propose some ideas for the future role of frameless visuals in music ensemble performance. PIGS (Percussive Image Gestural System) website and video documentation: http://amy-alexander.com/pigs
Chapter published in Entautomatisierung. Brauerhoch, Annette, Norbert Otto Eke, Renate Wieser, an... more Chapter published in Entautomatisierung. Brauerhoch, Annette, Norbert Otto Eke, Renate Wieser, and Anke Zechner, Hg., eds. Paderborn: Fink, Wilhelm, 2014.
The text discusses cultural and political implications of the subjective aspects of software and ... more The text discusses cultural and political implications of the subjective aspects of software and the SVEN project. SVEN (Surveillance Video Entertainment Network) is a public space software art project that uses custom computer vision software to detect pedestrians who in some way look like rock stars. The text introduces general audiences to SVEN’s approach to software subjectivity—in this case, concerning computer vision surveillance software. It also presents examples of software bias in contemporary culture and proposes software literacy as a public educational goal. 2008.
There has been a recent proliferation of video cameras on the World Wide Web. Ordinary people and... more There has been a recent proliferation of video cameras on the World Wide Web. Ordinary people and places are instantly subject to becom-ing part of the mass culture and are also potentially subject to cultural recycling. The Multi-Cultural Recycler puts a tongue-in-cheek spin on ...
Deep Hysteria is a still image series that repurposes algorithmic bias in the service of unraveli... more Deep Hysteria is a still image series that repurposes algorithmic bias in the service of unraveling a deep human bias. Artworks are generated using deep learning algorithms trained on still frames of thousands of YouTubers speaking to the camera. Generated individuals are then algorithmically gender-adjusted and the variations fed to Amazon Rekognition, a commercial deep learning based facial analysis algorithm (Amazon n.d.) that attempts to classify faces according to the subject's gender, age, and emotional appearance. Despite the marketing of such tools, reading emotions solely by analyzing a person's face is a feat that neither humans (Callahan 2021, Le Mau 2021) nor "AI's" (Crawford 2021) can reliably do. Further, these deep learning algorithms are themselves trained on data categorized by humans-so they reflect human biases. The side-by-side images in Deep Hysteria compare Rekognition's interpretation of similar expressions on more masculine and more feminine versions of the same face. The comparisons interrogate how humans perceive emotion differently, and often in alignment with stereotypes, when observing people of differing genders.
ISEA 22 Proceedings / Second Summit on New Media Archiving, 2022
The 20th century saw various approaches to expanded cinema performance, including color organs an... more The 20th century saw various approaches to expanded cinema performance, including color organs and mixed media "psychedelic" light shows. These practices were difficult to document technically and were, to various extents, based on performance in the moment. Technically, archival 20th century visual performance documentation and preservation ranges from the non-existent to the surprisingly future proofed. But expanded cinema historian William Moritz summed up the unrepeatability of performance experience in a 1969 review of the mixed media performance ensemble Single Wing Turquoise Bird: "always only once." Contemporary performative digital practice shares some parallels with these earlier performative practices: the work may be performed live by a performer, or an algorithm may perform the work automatically. In either case, preservation faces the paradox of recreating moments that were intended to happen "always only once." Examining 20th century attempts to preserve the ephemeral can inform not only how we approach preservation of performative and process-based digital works, but also which works we attempt to preserve.
Recent studies have demonstrated that algorithmic bias exhibited by neural networks can amplify h... more Recent studies have demonstrated that algorithmic bias exhibited by neural networks can amplify human bias and stereotyping in the interpretation of online content. But since algorithms determine public visibility of user-produced media content, algorithmic bias also has a curatorial role in determining whether content is seen by the public at all. This visibility bias has the potential to impact and amplify public perceptions of social media platforms and their content creators in aggregate. The internet livestream art project, What the Robot Saw, inverts this algorithmic bias by curating clips from among the least visible current YouTube videos, while using neural networks to playfully reinterpret the content itself. This paper describes What the Robot Saw and the cultural and social issues of neural net-based algorithms that surround it.
Amy Alexander and Curt Miller discuss mixed modal improvisation with their custom integrated soft... more Amy Alexander and Curt Miller discuss mixed modal improvisation with their custom integrated software systems PIGS (Alexander, visuals) and The Farm (Miller, sound.) In this free-flowing discussion, Alexander and Miller discuss historical visual, music and programming practices including abstract animation, graphic scores, and object-oriented programming. They discuss how these trajectories feed into the development of PIGS, a system designed to facilitate improvisation by using drums and visual controllers to perform structured visuals. The artists then discuss the specificities of mixed-modal collaborative improvisation, including the impact of representational content (algorithmically curated YouTube videos) on their responses as improvisers. They review responses to PIGS performances to date and discuss future plans for new PIGS performance context. They conclude with a discussion of PIGS as audiovisual performance research and propose some ideas for the future role of frameless visuals in music ensemble performance. PIGS (Percussive Image Gestural System) website and video documentation: http://amy-alexander.com/pigs
Chapter published in Entautomatisierung. Brauerhoch, Annette, Norbert Otto Eke, Renate Wieser, an... more Chapter published in Entautomatisierung. Brauerhoch, Annette, Norbert Otto Eke, Renate Wieser, and Anke Zechner, Hg., eds. Paderborn: Fink, Wilhelm, 2014.
The text discusses cultural and political implications of the subjective aspects of software and ... more The text discusses cultural and political implications of the subjective aspects of software and the SVEN project. SVEN (Surveillance Video Entertainment Network) is a public space software art project that uses custom computer vision software to detect pedestrians who in some way look like rock stars. The text introduces general audiences to SVEN’s approach to software subjectivity—in this case, concerning computer vision surveillance software. It also presents examples of software bias in contemporary culture and proposes software literacy as a public educational goal. 2008.
There has been a recent proliferation of video cameras on the World Wide Web. Ordinary people and... more There has been a recent proliferation of video cameras on the World Wide Web. Ordinary people and places are instantly subject to becom-ing part of the mass culture and are also potentially subject to cultural recycling. The Multi-Cultural Recycler puts a tongue-in-cheek spin on ...
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