Recoding Art: Van Abbemuseum

During 2018, I worked alongside artist and researcher Bruno Moreschi to read the artworks in the Van Abbemuseum collection (Eindhoven, NL) using commercial image-recognition (Computer Vision) Artificial Intelligences from leading tech companies.

The main takeaways were: somewhat as expected, AI is constructed through a capitalist and product-focused reading of the world (values that are embedded in this sociotechnical system); that this process of using AI is an innovative way for doing institutional critique, as AI offers an untrained eye that reveals the inner workings of the art system through its glitches.

This research, unlike some already existing critical analyses of AI, does not focus on accountability and bias. It aims to regard these glitches as potentially revealing of the art system, and even poetic at times. They reveal the inherent fallibility of the commercial use of AI and machine learning to catalogue the world: it cannot comprehend other ways of knowing about the world, outside the logic of the algorithm. But, at the same time, due to their “glitchy” capacity to nivelate and reimagine, these faulty readings can also serve as a new way of reading art; a new way for thinking critically about the art image in a moment when visual culture has changed form to hybrids of human-machine cognition and “machine-to-machine seeing” (Paglen, 2016).

Project’s Webpage.

A research by Bruno Moreschi and Gabriel Pereira. Short movie, HD, 14'32", 2019.

Research article published on AI & Society: doi:10.1007/s00146-020-01059-y. Essay on the project published on the Deviant Practice publication (2019), with Portuguese translation on Revista Farol. The project was presented, among other places, at the Museum Takeover: Bodies of Knowledge (May 2019). and IDFA 2019 DocLab Interactive Conference.

World Premiere: IDFA 2019, as part of the Competition for Short Documentary. Also exhibited at IDFA DocLab.
French Premiere: Videoformes, Clermont-Ferrand.
Brazilian Premiere: Festival É Tudo Verdade / It’s All True, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
USA Premiere: Aspen ShortsFest, Aspen.
UK Premiere: i-Docs, Bristol.
Canadian Premiere: Hot Docs, Toronto.

Available online at: Aeon Magazine.