Ways of Seeing
Ways of Seeing
© Michel Erler
We live in a time in which more images are taken by and for machines than by human beings. The peculiarity in which these apparatuses see and construct the world has real implications: They reconstruct and produce their own, novel and unseen worlds of images that change the view of what appears to be given, true and possible.
Ways of Seeing is an immersive installation in which the role of various machines is taken on in a contemplative way. The world is measured through the eyes of the imaging machines and their posthuman perspectives and new worldviews are thus made divisible. Wandering through the city as a smartphone constantly looking for facial features, the world appears as a flickering, triangulated accumulation of vectors. Constructing the environment as a giant point cloud, an autonomous car attempts to navigate through the streets. At night, a drone detects the body heat of the city’s inhabitants with its infrared sensors. This is a game environment to engender forms of non-human empathy and understanding of how machines construct the world. By clicking on different subject positions you are able to switch between different cameras, different algorithms and ultimately different ways of seeing. Clicking on different points of view becomes an interplay of cameras, technologies and their ways of looking at things. In particular, the work shows us the different algorithms and ultimately the different ways of seeing that change from the non-human perception to the seasoned, mediated experience.
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