Phantom images staring at us: The eye of the machine as viewed by artists
Type de matériel :
30
In the late 1980s, Paul Virilio (1988) observed the increasing delegation of the human eye to vision machines. This regime of automated images is characterized by the machines’ “blindness.” This paper wishes to explore the relationships between the human eye and computer vision and how it is addressed by several contemporary artists whose practices are very different but who all explore computer vision (Harun Farocki, Trevor Paglen, Julien Prévieux, Eva and Franco Mattes, Miguel Chevalier, and Paolo Cirio). From operational images (Farocki 2004) in a military context, to Google Street View recordings or facial recognition, this article aims to reflect upon the interactions of the human eye with that of the computer. By analyzing key artworks, this paper considers the computer eye as an eye that is never “naïve” (Debray 1994), but that is on the contrary always inscribed in material, social, political, or economic issues and contexts, in other words, in properly human issues. These issues must be analyzed to make the machine’s “blind” eye visible.
Réseaux sociaux