Artificial Senses told by aesthetic researcher Kim Albrecht

Contemporary culture is unimaginable without the machines that surround and guide us throughout the day. Google search results frame our knowledge, the mixes Spotify creates for us shapes our music tastes, and Amazon recommendations influence our consumption. All these systems present themselves as unknowns to us through their slick interfaces, obscuring the actuality of these systems. 

This strange new world became an intrinsic part of our reality in a brief timeframe. Companies that are part of this economy developed strategies that turn these new technologies into something that feels natural to us: 'It just works,' as Steve Jobs liked to say. (Distelmeyer 2017; Moisescot 2009) Interface design is the discipline that turns the machine into something that creates this natural feeling. But if we want to live with these devices and understand them, we cannot merely rely on the machines becoming something easily understandable to us. We need to develop an understanding of how these devices are different than us, as humans, and at the same time understand how technology is always culturally created by us.

With machine learning and artificial intelligence being such buzzwords nowadays, not having an understanding of how these machines experience the world is dangerous. How can we live and interact with these alien apparatuses that we set into the world, if the only thing we know about these machines are constructed interfaces that make the machine feel so close to the world we already know?

Computer-Human Interfaces usually try to be as human as possible. Conversely, in this series of works, the interfaces seek to be as close to the machine view as possible, creating images that are strange and difficult to interpret for the human viewer, but entirely natural for the machine.

In the early 2000s, documentary filmmaker and artist Harun Farocki distinguished a new kind of image. He called them 'Operational Images'-pictures that are part of a technical operation, a process in which they are needed to for fill a specific goal. (Distelmeyer 2017; Paglen 2014) In the movie 'Eye/Machine III' (Farocki 2003) Farocki showcases how the machine sees, how it experiences the world, and how it uses operational images to do so. For example, in the third part Farocki goes through the process how a laser-sensor examines a bridge; how that bridge is read into the computer as a three-dimensional model. The next cut shows different machine perspectives: a photograph, a 3D model, a satellite image overlaid with graphics, and airplane video footage including markings by the machine. As Trevor Paglen points out (Paglen 2014), the problem is the machine does not see-humans see. Our machinery only calculates. They do not need operational images, as they do not rely on visuals to sense the world. Images showcasing how the machine sees always rely on an interface, a mapping from the machine to the human world, from understanding the world through calculation to understanding the world through human senses.