An Algorithm's Introduction in the White Cube

A series of experiments into the quantification of art and subjective judgement.

year: 2020
type: artistic research
role: artist · researcher · developer
key words: machine learning · object detection · installation · videos · process

An Algorithm's Introduction in the White Cube is an artistic research project exploring what happens when subjective ideas about art are translated into computational systems. The project began with an attempt to generate proposals for new “successful” artworks from Tate Modern's collection data. But while working with the dataset, I became increasingly interested in the subjective terms hidden inside it like anxiety, love, banality and compassion. This shifted the project from asking whether an algorithm could produce successful art to asking whether a machine could learn to recognize these subjective qualities at all.

Artists Amber Moerland, Joy Heijnen, Dieke Coumans + object detection algorithm at work

Installation view, Breda Central Station, 2020, in collaboration with Anne Bergman

Object detection algorithm labeling Anne Bergman's work

Installation view, Young Art Weekend 2020, Singular Art Gallery Nijmegen, in collaboration with Indigo Deijmann

Object detection algorithm labeling Indigo Deijmann's work

Collecting and labeling of training data, gathered from the internet

Object detection algorithm labeling image

Early stage object detection algorithm labeling image