In this talk, Dr Rosemary Lee will present her book Algorithm, Image, Art, which examines the history, processes, and ideas behind current visual culture. Machine learning algorithms now have a pervasive influence on the aesthetics and meaning of images.

The highly automated performance of visual processing tasks by machines allows digital aesthetics to be informed by algorithms, statistical models, and the large-scale analysis of data. As a result, images are increasingly defined by their engagement with algorithms, which structure them aesthetically, processually, and semantically in ways that often exceed description in terms of direct human perception, agency, and understanding, while being to a great extent informed by and entangled with these. In this sense, recent technical developments such as the computational generation of images using machine learning systems tap into long-running theoretical challenges regarding the non-visual, immaterial, and non-human aspects of art, images, and visual media.

But while novel in some aspects, these recent developments are connected to much earlier, even analog, geometrical, optical, and procedural methods. The talk draws connections between the algorithmic forms of visual media we are familiar with today and the precursors from which they evolved. Tracing the history of algorithmic image production back to earlier instances that have meaningfully shaped artistic practices and that offer insight into current discourses around machine learning and artificial intelligence, Algorithm, Image, Art looks into the role played by algorithms in structuring visual compositions geometrically and processually, which ultimately holds implications for how they are interpreted. This work addresses a need for counternarratives to the current intense hype about artificial intelligence.

Bio

Rosemary Lee is an artist and media researcher. Her work considers how image production technologies fit within larger narratives about art, knowledge, and relations between humans and machines. Informed by the perspective of media archaeology, she seeks to develop a better understanding of how current methods and ideas about art and technology are influenced by those of the past. Lee’s recent book Algorithm, Image, Art expands on her PhD project Machine Learning and Notions of the Image, which she completed at the IT-University of Copenhagen in 2020. Rosemary Lee lectures at the University of Porto in the Master in Multimedia program. Her work has been presented in international contexts connected to art and technology including residencies with the European Media Art Platform and the Vilém Flusser Archive.

https://www.atropospress.com/algo-image-art-rosemary-display?rq=lee

https://rosemary-lee.com