Beauty & The Beep

Nothing is as it seems. Be suspicious of normality. This image is from my latest short film *Beauty & The Beep* in which I trained a chair to walk with Unity’s machine learning toolkit. It’s my lastest film on computer vision developed for the home exposing the politics of synthetic training datasets through playing with the absurd and silly to question what at first glance appears normal, in reaction to the biased assumptions coded into new seeing technology.

I am interested in synthetic images that are attempting to hide in plain sight and remain unnoticed. The ones we are not supposed to talk about. Boring, mundane images. They are the real revolution, part of a slow seep of change, right in front of our eyes. I am thinking here of the product imagery in the IKEA catalogue that has shifted from 2006 until the last edition to an almost entirely computer generated publication, replacing traditional product photography. Or the massive synthetic image training datasets that are accumulated to train computer vision for robotics and autonomous vehicles. They are part of a category of images, mundane cgi, that are slowly shifting our understanding of ground truth, that which is factually real and true.