Human Audits Machine Office (2018)
Human Audit Machine Office (HAM office) is a fictional digital consultancy that hires human to audit the performance of computer vision and automated algorithmic creation. With a motto “Machines are auxiliary data consumption beings,” this collaboration with new media artist Bryant Hoban consists of two parts. Machines of Loving Grace is a poetry-generating machine trained on the corpus of Richard Brautigan, whose poem inspires the project title. Visually Similar Images is an archive of images that is classified as ‘visually similar’ by Google Vision API. The office creates reports to document the following process: human workers extract an image from school textbooks, copy the image caption and pass the image through Google’s Vision API. They then archive the label and the images that were identified by the application as visually similar images. Through repetitions, the process reveals an alternative semantic network of images, one that is dictated by metadata-oriented machine algorithms and is indifferent to history and other human-centric concepts.
The document template is uploaded online and the public is invited to create their own HAM audit reports.
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Click the image to view the inner pages of the report
