Synthetic Imagery, Synthetic Imaginary

Sunday 1 August 2021

Experiments

Teaching

How do we use external services or automated tools to facilitate & outsource our research and production?

“Not seeing anything intelligible is the new normal. Information is passed on as a set of signals that cannot be picked up by human senses. Contemporary perception is machinic to large degrees. The spectrum of human vision only covers a tiny part of it. Electric charges, radio waves, light pulses encoded by machines for machines are zipping by at slightly subluminal speed. Seeing is superseded by calculating probabilities. Vision loses importance and is replaced by filtering, decrypting, and pattern recognition...”1

“What becomes legible to human viewers are the visual traces of the ideology the algorithms work to reproduce — the reality they try to impose on and through the data sets they work on.” 2

In this project we explored 'synthetic imaginaries' (apophenia) as a research methodology and 'synthetic imagery' as a process.


Footnotes

  1. Hito Steyerl, A Sea of Data

  2. Rob Horning, Plausible Disavowal