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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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Technology and the self
Greetings from Green Bank – the small town where modern technology is banned
10 minutes
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Stories and literature
What makes John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ so enduringly powerful?
10 minutes
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Human evolution
Far from frivolous, cuteness is a powerful – and still mysterious – force of nature
6 minutes
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Dance and theatre
How a Noh mask-maker summons a lifelike face from a single block of wood
16 minutes
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The ancient world
What wine vessels reveal about politics and luxury in ancient Athens and Persia
16 minutes
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Art
David Goldblatt captured the contradictions of apartheid in stark black and white
15 minutes
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Philosophy of mind
Do we have good reasons to believe in beliefs? A radical philosophy of mind says no
5 minutes
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Space exploration
In the search for life, might alien ocean worlds be a better bet than Earth-like planets?
5 minutes
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Philosophy of religion
How a devout Catholic philosopher approaches the problem of evil
8 minutes