The question of non-human and possibly inaccessible subjectivities hangs over this year’s Singapore Biennale – does the exhibition itself have some degree of consciousness?

On Amazon’s Mechanical Turk job platform, businesses can hire gig-workers to perform short, repetitive tasks for a few cents apiece. Many of these assignments, such as image recognition, are used to train machine-learning models, or AI, to better understand the world. Artist Aarti Sunder is interested in the intersection of analogue and digital realms, and the hidden manual-labour needed to achieve the ‘magic’ of smooth automation. In the video Ghost Cut: Some Clear Pixels Among Many Black Boxes (2021), she exposes the material conditions of workers on Mechanical Turk by asking them to film their homes or workspaces. We see grainy footage of basic amenities: table, office chair, cupboard, bare walls with exposed wiring. Playing in tandem, in a smaller, picture-in-picture window, is a fast-flowing, constantly morphing stream of images that is similar to the main footage, but not quite. Shots of a window, for example, are echoed by other similar compositions of windows or television screens; an exposed black plug translates, unstably, to a dog, clothes and trash.

A computer-whizz friend tells me that the images in the smaller window were probably generated by an image-analysis model that translates input pictures into similar output pictures. Rationally, I understand that it is a computational trick; but I can’t shake the feeling that I am watching a weird and cunning intelligence at work, a resourceful but imperfect mimicry of source data that flits between recognition and misrecognition. As to what ends that occurs, this ‘mind’ remains unreadable.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.