I am exhibiting in an excellent show at the Science Gallery in Rotterdam curated by William Meyers. While the show will not be able to be attended by most in person due to the COVID-19 pandemic, you can visit the works online here: https://unrealexhibition.com/en
The show happens to be in a hospital, and it is my hope that it gives our medical professionals, our heroes at this time, some solace and inspiration. I wanted to take this time to thank all of those that are working so hard to keep us healthy and safe. Wishing all of you good health.
From the curator:
What is real, and how are you sure it is so? Can you be confident in your perceptions when so many experiences are digital or influenced by the changing chemistry and architecture of your brain? Biomedical research uncovers ways that our minds and senses produce gaps between the actual and the observed. How do we navigate such ‘blind spots’, which can be exploited by trickery like fake news, but then embraced willingly to escape from reality? Researchers work to answer, as well as to complicate these questions, as we build new understanding of mental conditions such as dementia and phenomena like the placebo effect, and we advance basic research in Neuroscience. At the same time, research in fields such as Genetics and Reproductive and Regenerative Medicine is destabilizing the reality of nature as we know it.
Brains are essentially prediction machines, according to recent arguments by scientists and philosophers. They are bundles of cells that support perception and action by constantly working to match sensory inputs with expectations or predictions. This set of images explores the computational and cognitive eye, as it relates to bodies, vision, cognition, and perception.
Algorithmic Animal Gaze displays images of the artist Ani Liu’s body, subdivided into small square parcels. These squares are organized hierarchically via the Shannon-fano algorithm, which sorts them, from the center outwards, according to how “interesting” they are — or how our gaze and a computer tend to track the body. Fascinatingly, the features the computational eye found interesting ended up being the same features human eyes like to dwell on — eyes, lips, breasts, vulva, fingers, nose.
The three images explore this concept at different levels of parcel resolution, testing the minimum viable feature size in which this algorithm and the human eye maintain their similarities. While the human brain looks for recognizable features — which is lost as parcels get too small to clearly identify an ‘eye’ or ‘nose’, for example — the algorithm only analyzes how predictable the pixels are, from parcel to parcel.
