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When mundane objects such as cords, keys and cloths are fed into a live webcam, a machine-learning algorithm ‘sees’ brilliant colours and images such as seascapes and flowers instead. The London-based, Turkish-born visual artist Memo Akten applies algorithms to the webcam feed as a way to reflect on the technology and, by extension, on ourselves. Each instalment in his Learning to See series features a pre-trained deep-neural network ‘trying to make sense of what it sees, in context of what it’s seen before’. In Gloomy Sunday, the algorithm draws from tens of thousands of images scraped from the Google Arts Project, an extensive collection of super-high-resolution images of notable artworks. Set to the voice of the avant-garde singer Diamanda Galás, the resulting video has unexpected pathos, prompting reflection on how our minds construct images based on prior inputs, and not on precise recreations of the outside world.
Video by Memo Akten
Music: Diamanda Galas – Gloomy Sunday
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Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
14 minutes
video
Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
video
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
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Biology
Beetles take flight at 6,000 frames per second in this perspective-shifting short
9 minutes
video
War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
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Physics
What does it look like to hunt for dark matter? Scenes from one frontier in the search
7 minutes
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Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
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Information and communication
An animation built from road signs is a whirlwind study of flash communication
2 minutes
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Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes