6 ms·

When photography “produces something other than photographs”

92 points by chippy 3y ago

chrisweekly 3y ago
Interesting article about an extremely thoughtful artist. I liked this quote, "...artwork can be seen as an interface to experience the world. This makes the artwork akin to a scientific experiment, but while the experiment seeks to provide objective and repeatable knowledge, the artwork provides meaning and alternate points of view."
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  I try to look at modern art with similar lens, that way I can accept and tolerate at least some of them while pondering about their effects on me, and even find beauty in few. But I have to ignore what giants like Rembrandt achieved, how much effort they put in and how universal those messages are. And sure as hell I can't and don't want to ignore that. I guess I'll stay in the museums of the old masters (but not too old).
  - hef19898 3y ago
    I am somehow drawn to the old Dutch masters and early Impressionists. Previously, I never was much of an art guy, since I took up photography again I look at art differently. Especially the play with light and shadows, composition amd colours. I guess the closer paintings are to reality, the more I can take from them, and thus I am drawn more to them. For more abstract works I need time. Strangely, I develop a fondness for some of Dali's work... That being said, when visiting the van Gogh museum, I much preferred his earlier work more resembling the old Dutch masters. Still do.
  - thinkyfish 3y ago
    You bring up an interesting point, not all modern art is directed at anyone other than the artist themselves. Its less likely in that framework that a particular artist just happens to create art that most people would also like and create a name for themselves and there are fewer trying to show off an absurd quantity of craftsmanship in a single work.
  - MiddleEndian 3y ago
    >I guess I'll stay in the museums of the old masters (but not too old). On the other hand, I really enjoy the medieval art where there is absolutely no perspective and everything is the wrong size. I'd go to an exhibit just for that.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  I like the site in general for its dedication to Hard Art. I used to visit at least weekly some ten years ago just to inhale a little bit of that European-tinged creativity. I'm happy to see it make the front page of HN. I should return to visiting more often.
johnp271 3y ago
This artist's several sentence summary of an ANN and relating it to prejudice is fascinating: "The output of an artificial neural network can be roughly defined as a conclusion obtained by generalising a limited set of observations. Surprisingly prejudice can be defined in the same way. This will always be a problem with systems that generalize information. No matter how large and representative a dataset might be there will always be an eccentric outlier that will break the system." On the one hand this succinctly sums up the challenges we face with AI systems becoming more and more ubiquitous and on the other hand the reality we non-artifical intellegent humans face in living our lives and dealing with day to day encounters.
- giantg2 3y ago
  "The output of an artificial neural network can be roughly defined as a conclusion obtained by generalising a limited set of observations. Surprisingly prejudice can be defined in the same way." Not really surprising. The first thing they teach in data science is that bias is everywhere. One of the first things taught in programming is garbage in garbage out and that computers do exactly what we tell them. Once you start making decisions with biased data you will start to prejudice some group. The quest for non-biases systems is a little like a perpetual motion machine. If we all have biases and these machines learn from the same data we do, using systems we write, how could one expect a different outcome? The
  - nerpderp82 3y ago
    This is why you strive to identify the biases and move them from system 1 to system 2 thinking. AI will help humanity operate in a direct cognitive regime rather than sub-conscious one.
    - bequanna 3y ago
      Not all or even most subconscious influence on decision making is bad. There is plenty we can’t yet quantify and fully understand.
- BurningFrog 3y ago
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
Artists (specifically conceptual artists) are generally poor philosophers. You can expect a sort of a hodge-podge of presently fashionable ideas combined with some colloquial observations, banality, and inscrutable turns of phrase. Take the distinction between the natural and the artificial. A colloquial distinction is not especially sensible. It's some kind of conflation between "man-made", not occurring in "nature" and "fake" which confuses a few notions that are not mutually dependent on one another. In the first case, that something is man-made merely means that human beings made it. Water can be synthesized, but there is no difference between the water we find around us and the water we can synthesize. Human production involves the use of reason to modify or transform existing things to produce something else. But transformation of things is very much universal. Our cells transform things. Non-human animals and plants transform things. Stars transform things. The universe is in a constant flux of transformation. While only human beings are known to produce plastic (as far as I know), there is no reason in principle why other life forms or physical processes might not effect plastic. In the second case, the notion of "nature" is a vague, largely romantic idea that doesn't seem to mean anything more than everything that isn't Man or man-made. Distinguishing Man from the rest of the universe is not unreasonable for certain metaphysical reasons (for example, the capacity for reason and thus moral responsibility; artifact as a product of deliberately and directly rational activity). But whence the sense of alienation? Perhaps this has to do with human moral failure. Traditionally, in the Jewish and Christian traditions, men were understood to be stewards of creation (pagan cultures tended toward pantheism which incidentally stifled their scientific development; modernism tends to denigrate the world by adopting a desiccated and reductive metaphysics which, while perhaps practical in some cases, is false). Stewardship is a responsibility and thus a failure in this regard can create a sense of rift. In the third case, "artificial" can mean "fake", something presented as something it is not. But the mere fact that something is man-made doesn't mean it is "fake", and artifactual identity is dependent in part on the cultural conventions it is embedded in. "Nature", in a traditional metaphysical sense, is merely the nature of a thing. There is human nature, the nature of plastic, the nature of water or trees or whatever. These are all real things and their nature is what makes them what they are. Thus, the "unnatural" is that which is opposed to the nature of a thing doing it. We say that a desire to eat glass or Styrofoam is unnatural because the consumption of it has no nutritive value, and the desire to eat is per se ordered toward nutrition. Thus we say that the desire to eat glass or Styrofoam is disordered, even intrinsically disordered. Wishing to cut your arm off is unnatural because human nature is ordered toward self-preservation. "Nature" is very teleological, in other words, but it is the basis for normativity.
cryptonector 3y ago
How does this AI sound camera thing detect color? I can see such a device seeing shapes and movements, but not color.
- mzs 3y ago
  Maybe because he trained it on Mexico City videos and as an example in the subway for those particular sounds the ANN best matched the subway, the subway where in the training set the trains were that color. That was a great question BTW!
- flangola7 3y ago
  How do you know the leaves bustling in the wind are green?
  - cryptonector 3y ago
    They might not be. They might be brown. But apart from that, how would this device know the color of a train?
mgdlbp 3y ago
That's a different lensless camera art project than yesterday's (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36139729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36139729). Related list of lists: https://github.com/golanlevin/ExperimentalCapture/blob/master/docs/conceptual-cameras.md https://github.com/golanlevin/ExperimentalCapture/blob/maste... https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/situations-post/vernetzte-kameras/ https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/situations-post/vernetzte-kamer... https://unthinking.photography/imgexhaust/three-new-cameras https://unthinking.photography/imgexhaust/three-new-cameras "Don't tell me you're going to use that smartphone for night photography." "My camera is augmented."
webel0 3y ago
I like the effort that the artist put into designing objects that we might consider to be strictly functional. For example, his data collection device and even the suit he worse to do data collection.

92 points by chippy 3y ago

Interesting article about an extremely thoughtful artist. I liked this quote, "...artwork can be seen as an interface to experience the world. This makes the artwork akin to a scientific experiment, but while the experiment seeks to provide objective and repeatable knowledge, the artwork provides meaning and alternate points of view."

saiya-jin 3y ago
I try to look at modern art with similar lens, that way I can accept and tolerate at least some of them while pondering about their effects on me, and even find beauty in few. But I have to ignore what giants like Rembrandt achieved, how much effort they put in and how universal those messages are. And sure as hell I can't and don't want to ignore that. I guess I'll stay in the museums of the old masters (but not too old).
- hef19898 3y ago
  I am somehow drawn to the old Dutch masters and early Impressionists. Previously, I never was much of an art guy, since I took up photography again I look at art differently. Especially the play with light and shadows, composition amd colours. I guess the closer paintings are to reality, the more I can take from them, and thus I am drawn more to them. For more abstract works I need time. Strangely, I develop a fondness for some of Dali's work... That being said, when visiting the van Gogh museum, I much preferred his earlier work more resembling the old Dutch masters. Still do.
- thinkyfish 3y ago
  You bring up an interesting point, not all modern art is directed at anyone other than the artist themselves. Its less likely in that framework that a particular artist just happens to create art that most people would also like and create a name for themselves and there are fewer trying to show off an absurd quantity of craftsmanship in a single work.
- MiddleEndian 3y ago
  >I guess I'll stay in the museums of the old masters (but not too old). On the other hand, I really enjoy the medieval art where there is absolutely no perspective and everything is the wrong size. I'd go to an exhibit just for that.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
I like the site in general for its dedication to Hard Art. I used to visit at least weekly some ten years ago just to inhale a little bit of that European-tinged creativity. I'm happy to see it make the front page of HN. I should return to visiting more often.

johnp271 3y ago

This artist's several sentence summary of an ANN and relating it to prejudice is fascinating: "The output of an artificial neural network can be roughly defined as a conclusion obtained by generalising a limited set of observations. Surprisingly prejudice can be defined in the same way. This will always be a problem with systems that generalize information. No matter how large and representative a dataset might be there will always be an eccentric outlier that will break the system." On the one hand this succinctly sums up the challenges we face with AI systems becoming more and more ubiquitous and on the other hand the reality we non-artifical intellegent humans face in living our lives and dealing with day to day encounters.

giantg2 3y ago
"The output of an artificial neural network can be roughly defined as a conclusion obtained by generalising a limited set of observations. Surprisingly prejudice can be defined in the same way." Not really surprising. The first thing they teach in data science is that bias is everywhere. One of the first things taught in programming is garbage in garbage out and that computers do exactly what we tell them. Once you start making decisions with biased data you will start to prejudice some group. The quest for non-biases systems is a little like a perpetual motion machine. If we all have biases and these machines learn from the same data we do, using systems we write, how could one expect a different outcome? The
- nerpderp82 3y ago
  This is why you strive to identify the biases and move them from system 1 to system 2 thinking. AI will help humanity operate in a direct cognitive regime rather than sub-conscious one.
  - bequanna 3y ago
    Not all or even most subconscious influence on decision making is bad. There is plenty we can’t yet quantify and fully understand.
BurningFrog 3y ago

lo_zamoyski 3y ago

Artists (specifically conceptual artists) are generally poor philosophers. You can expect a sort of a hodge-podge of presently fashionable ideas combined with some colloquial observations, banality, and inscrutable turns of phrase. Take the distinction between the natural and the artificial. A colloquial distinction is not especially sensible. It's some kind of conflation between "man-made", not occurring in "nature" and "fake" which confuses a few notions that are not mutually dependent on one another. In the first case, that something is man-made merely means that human beings made it. Water can be synthesized, but there is no difference between the water we find around us and the water we can synthesize. Human production involves the use of reason to modify or transform existing things to produce something else. But transformation of things is very much universal. Our cells transform things. Non-human animals and plants transform things. Stars transform things. The universe is in a constant flux of transformation. While only human beings are known to produce plastic (as far as I know), there is no reason in principle why other life forms or physical processes might not effect plastic. In the second case, the notion of "nature" is a vague, largely romantic idea that doesn't seem to mean anything more than everything that isn't Man or man-made. Distinguishing Man from the rest of the universe is not unreasonable for certain metaphysical reasons (for example, the capacity for reason and thus moral responsibility; artifact as a product of deliberately and directly rational activity). But whence the sense of alienation? Perhaps this has to do with human moral failure. Traditionally, in the Jewish and Christian traditions, men were understood to be stewards of creation (pagan cultures tended toward pantheism which incidentally stifled their scientific development; modernism tends to denigrate the world by adopting a desiccated and reductive metaphysics which, while perhaps practical in some cases, is false). Stewardship is a responsibility and thus a failure in this regard can create a sense of rift. In the third case, "artificial" can mean "fake", something presented as something it is not. But the mere fact that something is man-made doesn't mean it is "fake", and artifactual identity is dependent in part on the cultural conventions it is embedded in. "Nature", in a traditional metaphysical sense, is merely the nature of a thing. There is human nature, the nature of plastic, the nature of water or trees or whatever. These are all real things and their nature is what makes them what they are. Thus, the "unnatural" is that which is opposed to the nature of a thing doing it. We say that a desire to eat glass or Styrofoam is unnatural because the consumption of it has no nutritive value, and the desire to eat is per se ordered toward nutrition. Thus we say that the desire to eat glass or Styrofoam is disordered, even intrinsically disordered. Wishing to cut your arm off is unnatural because human nature is ordered toward self-preservation. "Nature" is very teleological, in other words, but it is the basis for normativity.

cryptonector 3y ago

How does this AI sound camera thing detect color? I can see such a device seeing shapes and movements, but not color.

mzs 3y ago
Maybe because he trained it on Mexico City videos and as an example in the subway for those particular sounds the ANN best matched the subway, the subway where in the training set the trains were that color. That was a great question BTW!
flangola7 3y ago
How do you know the leaves bustling in the wind are green?
- cryptonector 3y ago
  They might not be. They might be brown. But apart from that, how would this device know the color of a train?

mgdlbp 3y ago

That's a different lensless camera art project than yesterday's (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36139729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36139729). Related list of lists: https://github.com/golanlevin/ExperimentalCapture/blob/master/docs/conceptual-cameras.md https://github.com/golanlevin/ExperimentalCapture/blob/maste... https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/situations-post/vernetzte-kameras/ https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/situations-post/vernetzte-kamer... https://unthinking.photography/imgexhaust/three-new-cameras https://unthinking.photography/imgexhaust/three-new-cameras "Don't tell me you're going to use that smartphone for night photography." "My camera is augmented."

webel0 3y ago

I like the effort that the artist put into designing objects that we might consider to be strictly functional. For example, his data collection device and even the suit he worse to do data collection.