Talks

Mercedes Bunz

Talk
Digital Media: On New Ways of Seeing

Fr. 3rd of March- 6 pm ZHdK 6.K04
Postgraduate Programme in Curating, ZHdK

https://vimeo.com/207467582

Mercedes Bunz
Digital Media: On New Ways of Seeing

Digital Media has influenced artistic and curatorial practice in different ways. It has introduced new forms of aesthetics as much as it changed what can be searched and found and organized. Now it enters the process of seeing itself.
Machine learning has changed the role of images and what computers see. It has allowed computers to identify information they ‘see’ mostly correctly. But they don’t see the world as we do. What is it that they see? How are they making sense of our world? In her talk, Mercedes will explain what lead to the recent progress for new digital way of seeing. She will show examples of how computers see our world and where they fail but also where those techniques are already in use – from auto-focus, to the ability to identify an object, and to finally self-drive a car. In the last part of her talk she will then turn to the political implications this has. Besides surveillance, machine seeing puts a very new and urgent question forward: Whose reality is recognized by our digital devices? And whose reality gets ignored? And could art make use of those technologies to make different world visible?

Mercedes Bunz is a Dr. phil. and lives in London. She can be followed at twitter.com/mrsbunz. Among other things, she does the following:
• She writes about digital media and philosophy of technology
• She is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster and Joint-Course Leader MA Multimedia Journalism with Steve Hill
• She is is co-founder of meson.press, and is curious about digital publishing and #openaccess.
• She is currently writing a book about the internet of things and sensing networks with Graham Meikle.