Black Square

Malevich in his polemic approach to art saw himself on a mission to emancipate artistic forms from the world of resemblances. The iconic black square stands as this emblematic moment in twentieth century art presenting itself as a break with the past or a culmination of a history of ever diminishing resemblance between the artistic image and the visual world outside the canvas. And yet, when a machine that has no concept of the cultural and historical context looks at it, with its radical childlike innocence  it does reconnect this emancipated square with the everyday experience.

[Resemblance]
A classifier AI represents a perceptual system with a highly limited vocabulary of objects. It is a radically innocent, simplistic and transparent observer trained to accomplish a simple task of recognition and classification. Such AIs are the unglamorous low level workers of the AI world.  When such an observer is exposed to things beyond what it has been trained to recognize it can only describe what it sees as a probability spectrum of its prior knowledge.  Although much more limited than a human in its ability to understand the world, it is just an eye with unlimited attention span, that can look at thousands of images per second and report back with precision what it sees and how confident it is. A quantifiable perceptual system is like a new type of camera for measuring visual meaning rather than light. 


Animation:

black square : screen to airship

Size: variable
Media: digital animation
Year: 2022