Digital Art, Culture and Heritage: New constructs and consciousness

Invited presentation for special symposium at EVA London 2019. This half-day Symposium explores themes of digital art, culture, and heritage, bringing together speakers from a range of disciplines to consider technology with respect to artistic and academic practice. As we increasingly see ourselves and life through a digital lens and the world communicated on digital screens, we experience altered states of being and consciousness in ways that blur the lines between digital and physical reality, while our ways of thinking and seeing become a digital stream of consciousness that flows between place and cyberspace. We have entered the postdigital world and are living, working, and thinking with machines as our computational culture driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning embeds itself in everyday life and threads across art, culture, and heritage, juxtaposing them in the digital profusion of human creativity on the Internet

How much for the Michelangelo?: valuation, commoditization and finitism in the secondary art market

This article is a sociological re-evaluation of the auction house, a central institution of the secondary art market. As an intermediary between buyers and sellers, the auction house is portrayed as an institution that straddles the poles of economic (calculative) and social (aesthetic) life. Relying on the work of Michel Callon and Barry Barnes, the process of the commoditization that takes place within auction houses is presented as a structuring mechanism through which symbolic, economic and cultural values are shaped and reinforced. In particular, the finitist calculative practices associated with commoditization (through the generation of estimated auction prices) are presented as responsible for reproducing the secondary art market and the aesthetic judgements on which it is based

The deception of an infinite view – exploring machine vision in digital art

This paper examines prediction product called Queryable Earth a project to “make Earth searchable for all”. A project pitched by the company Planet, owner of the largest fleet of Earth-imaging satellites in orbit and an archive of satellite images growing with terabytes of fresh data every day. The aim of Queryable Earth is to combine geospatial intelligence with machine learning. By training artificial neural networks to classify objects, identify geographic features, and monitor change over time, the implied intention is to create a predictive, omniscient oracle. In this paper Queryable Earth functions as an example of a ‘nonconscious cognitive assemblage’ combining aerial image with machine learning techniques such as artificial neural networks. To examine the predictive potential and the assumed objectivity of machine vision systems such as Queryable Earth I turn to histories of aerial photography and examples of contemporary digital art to illustrate how human and technical cognition entwine revealing how seemingly automated processes such as rendering of satellite images and pattern recognition still inherit human biases and are prone to emphasize them. Furthermore, I use digital artworks to illustrate how Queryable Earth as an “all seeing machine” is limited to a singular aerial perspective which cannot penetrate the surface and how predictions produced by such systems are constrained the quality and selection of data they are trained on