Pekko Vasantola & Sheung Yiu
Common Objects in Context
5 August –28 August 2022
Opening reception Thursday 4th of August 2022,
5–7 p.m.
Hippolyte Gallery

Common Objects in Context delves into the grammar of machine vision and the shifting nature of photography in the algorithmic age. The exhibition title comes from the state-of-the-art dataset of the same name, better known as COCO, commonly used for training computer vision tasks such as object recognition. The exhibition examines the logic of object recognition—one of bounding boxes, discrete objects with clear outlines, crowdsourced labor, and distributed seeing.

COCO consists of more than 300,000 photographs scrapped from the photo-sharing site Flickr. Each image contains five captions written by cheap crowdsourced human workers. The workers are instructed to follow seven strict rules in describing the depicted scene such that the captions are clean, direct, and 'objective' for machine learning.

Describe all the important parts of the scene.
Do not start the sentences with "There is".
Do not describe unimportant details.
Do not describe things that might have happened in the future or past.
Do not describe what a person might say.
Do not give people proper names.
The sentences should contain at least 8 words.

The exhibition renders the logic of rule-based seeing into different media. The metal objects are re-shaped according to the seven rules, smoothened and polished, with captions etched onto their surfaces. Upon closer examination, the captions reveal that human vision is full of errors, assumptions, and subconscious interpretation. Others exemplify the irreducible complexity of visual understanding. Computer vision sees objects in all their shiny sheen, without the memory of the past or imagination for the future.