What do machines see? How do computers perceive us, read us? Are they biased? Can we fool the machine? Does camouflage work?
In a society where cameras are omnipresent, it is hard not to be seen. Surrounded by human and non-human eyes, invisibility is scarse. For a generation -in between Harry Potter and social media, invisibility is both superpower ànd metaphor for powerlessness. The one who wears the Invisibility Cloak versus ‘no followers on Instagram’. The notion of invisibility, either condition, metaphor, fantasy or technology, helps us think about the structure of society, how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen.
Through a Glass, Darkly is a series of portraits of young girls. Black & white photography combined with coloured stripes and dots -the graphic language used in image recognition technology, grammar of machine vision. Signal and noise, the quantifiable and the non-explicit, the photographic and its reduction, combined into a poetic analysis of contemporary society.
4
Martine Stig Martine Stig (b. 1972) is an artist based in Amsterdam. Point of departure in her work is the photographic image; the voyeuristic act: photography (verb) and the autonomic product: photo (noun). Whilst using the medium (and moving away from it) she researches its role in the perception of reality.
studies
Part of Studies
still from Art for Machine (artist talk), Martine Stig, 2020
In this research I focus on the changes the photographic image has undergone in the transition from analog to digital. In fact, the photographic image has become bilingual; it is both image and data and can be read by man and machine.
