Episode Two explores the benefits and disadvantages of going unseen by surveillance technologies. We examine notions of visibility and invisibility in the context of AI imaging systems with author and professor Simone Browne, artist Sondra Perry, and artist and academic Mimi Onuoha.

Since their previous episode about AI (episode 2), the conversation around AI has exploded and gone viral. Dall-e mini memes proliferated everywhere utilizing Dall-E mini now known as Craiyon, a text prompt AI image generator. An artist utilizing AI won first place in an art context, and the New York Times wrote about it. With that has also come skepticism, criticism, and fear regarding AI. William Wiebe is an artist and researcher whose work deals with machine perception, and created a project called SMPLverse which utilizes a synthetic data set created by Microsoft to train face tracking algorithms to translate facial ...

In her 2012 White Shadows: What is Missing from Images lecture at the Gdansk Academy of Fine Arts in Poland, Hito Steyerl speaks about how new technologies force us to reformulate important questions about the making visible, capturing, and documenting of information. In the first part of her talk, Steyerl focuses on the use of 3D scanning in forensic crime scene investigations. Steyerl explains how the 3D scanner, or LiDAR technology (Light Detection And Ranging), sends laser beams that reflect off of the surfaces of the objects that are being scanned. In this process, each point in space is measured ...

Photography has been used as a tool to record our bodies from the creation of the first mugshots in the late 19th century to recent developments in facial recognition technology. In the first episode of Mirror with a Memory, artist Zach Blas and filmmaker and scholar Manthia Diawara will discuss what it means to leave it to machines to verify our identities.

Zach Blas in conversation with Laurel Ptak, Art in General’s Executive Director & Curator, on the occasion of Blas’s exhibition Contra-Internet at Art in General and his lecture-performance Metric Mysticism at e-flux. Zach Blas is an artist and writer whose practice confronts technologies of capture, security, and control. Currently, he is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His recent works respond to biometric governmentality and network hegemony. Read more about the exhibition, on view through April 21, 2018, at artingeneral.org. Read Zach Blas’ essay in e-flux journal #74 (June 2016): “Contra-Internet”

‘Today we are facing extreme and most dangerous developments in the thought of security. In the course of a gradual neutralisation of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security imposes itself as the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several decisive measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation. The thought of security entails an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be ...

David Kim and Yazan Khalili discuss Yazan’s video, Hiding Our Faces Like a Dancing Wind, currently on view in the exhibition Being: New Photography 2018 at MoMA through August 19, 2018. “How do we disappear in the digital age? This is a project that works with the facial recognition technologies in smart devices and its historical background in the colonial practices.” You can find an additional conversation on the impossible legality of an artwork between David Kim, Yazan Khalili, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Jonathan Beller, and Vivian Ziherl in e-flux journal #90.

AI ethics has never been far from the industries it sought to critique. While originally designed to bring values such as fairness, accountability and transparency to Big Tech and its products, the lines between Big Tech’s PR initiatives and AI ethics funding has never been clear. In practice, AI ethics now operates as a means for the co-option of critics and to enable regulatory capture. It is used by corporations to create legitimacy and to further accumulate value. The result is that ‘ethics’ has now become a high-valued industrial commodity, and AI ethics its foundry. This anthology is a collective response ...

From predicting criminality to sexual orientation, fake and deeply flawed Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rampant. Amidst this feverishly hyped atmosphere, this book interrogates the rise and fall of AI hype, pseudoscience and snake oil. Bringing together different perspectives and voices from across disciplines and countries, it draws connections between injustices inflicted by inappropriate AI. Each chapter unpacks lazy and harmful assumptions made by developers when designing AI tools and systems, and examines the existential underpinnings of the technology itself to ask: why are there so many useless, and even dangerously flawed, AI systems?

The exhibition House of Mirrors: Artificial Intelligence as Phantasm takes the common clichés about AI as an opportunity to talk about issues such as hidden human labor, algorithmic bias/discrimination, the problem of categorization and classification, and our fantasies about AI. It asks whether (and how) it is possible for us to reclaim agency in this context. Featuring more than 20 artistic works by international artists, the exhibition is divided into seven thematic chapters. The scenography of the exhibition is reminiscent of a giant house of mirrors.

For decades, Lynn was told that she wasn’t an artist. That whatever it was she was doing, it most certainly wasn’t art. Nevertheless she persisted, and her story is truly one of perseverance, as today Lynn’s work can be found in art history books, art galleries, museums and private collections all over the world.

This book locates India’s flourishing internet within a complex 24-year history that has seen an unprecedented re-organization of social and political life. Three essays provide independent perspectives on a common area of inquiry, an era that witnessed a fundamental mutation of the State, its mechanisms of planning and governance, the public domain and the everyday, all mediated by digital technology, all impacting its internet. Bringing the essays together is a common timeline, which begins in the late 1970s, includes such landmarks as the Information Technology Act, the much-discussed Aadhaar biometric identification programme, the chequered career of social media, and the ...