Abstract
On 10 September 2020, Pace Gallery in London held an exhibition by the artist
Trevor Paglen examining the visual products from artificial intelligence and digital
data systems.1 Titled ‘Bloom’, the exhibition featured an over-sized sculpture of a
human head. Bald, white, and possibly male, this eerily symmetrical ‘standard head’
had been modelled on measurements from canonical experiments in facial recognition
history by Woody Wilson Bledsoe, Charles Bisson, and Helen Chan Wolf
occuring at Panoramic Research Laboratory in 1964.2
Centring this ‘standard head’ in the space, Paglen surrounded it with photographic
prints of leaves and flowers re-composed from RAW camera files by computer vision
algorithms. These machine visualisations of nature encircled the ‘standard head’
illustrating how digital imaging using autonomous toolsets can achieve significantly
different graphical outcomes. The exhibit foregrounded face recognition
technology yet provoked viewers to consider the cross-practice connections between
computing and data classification, humans and nature, and how image-making is
becoming technically autonomous.3 Another take-away is how these systems require
Trevor Paglen examining the visual products from artificial intelligence and digital
data systems.1 Titled ‘Bloom’, the exhibition featured an over-sized sculpture of a
human head. Bald, white, and possibly male, this eerily symmetrical ‘standard head’
had been modelled on measurements from canonical experiments in facial recognition
history by Woody Wilson Bledsoe, Charles Bisson, and Helen Chan Wolf
occuring at Panoramic Research Laboratory in 1964.2
Centring this ‘standard head’ in the space, Paglen surrounded it with photographic
prints of leaves and flowers re-composed from RAW camera files by computer vision
algorithms. These machine visualisations of nature encircled the ‘standard head’
illustrating how digital imaging using autonomous toolsets can achieve significantly
different graphical outcomes. The exhibit foregrounded face recognition
technology yet provoked viewers to consider the cross-practice connections between
computing and data classification, humans and nature, and how image-making is
becoming technically autonomous.3 Another take-away is how these systems require
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | The Cambridge Handbook of Facial Recognition in the Modern State |
| Place of Publication | United Kingdom |
| Publisher | Cambridge Publishing |
| Chapter | 3 |
| Pages | 44-59 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Volume | 1 |
| Edition | 1 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781009321211 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-1-009-32119-8 Hardback |
| Publication status | Published - 2024 |