Sometimes_Your_Eyes_Do_Not_See

Sometimes Your Eyes Do Not See
Às Vezes, os Teus Olhos Não Veem

https://doi.org/10.21814/vista.5887
e024014
Carloalberto Treccani
© Authors
https://doi.org/10.21814/vista.5887
Vista No. 14 | July – December 2024 | e024014
Submitted: 16/07/2024 | Reviewed: 11/10/2024 | Accepted: 04/11/2024 |
Published: 26/11/2024
_____________________________________________________________
Carloalberto Treccani
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8815-3498
Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Faculty of Arts, Hong Kong
Baptist University, Hong Kong SAR, China
_____________________________________________________________
Since its early days, machine vision has been deeply dependent on photographic
databases. As visually "intelligent" machines have rapidly advanced, this connec-
tion has strengthened and reversed the equation, with contemporary photographic
imagery significantly influenced by the techniques developed in computer sciences.
Using a technique called "histogram of oriented gradients", Sometimes Your Eyes
Do Not See explores the machinic gaze that increasingly permeates contemporary
artistic practices and reflects on the ways it affects our perception of the world.
Keywords: histogram of oriented gradients, machine vision, photography, art
practices
Às Vezes, os Teus Olhos Não Veem
Desde os seus primórdios, a visão artificial tem estado profundamente dependente
de bases de dados fotográficas. Com a rápida evolução das máquinas visualmente
“inteligentes”, esta ligação reforçou-se e inverteu a equação, com as imagens fo-
tográficas contemporâneas a serem significativamente influenciadas pelas técnicas
desenvolvidas nas ciências informáticas. Recorrendo a uma técnica conhecida
como "histograma de gradientes orientados", Sometimes Your Eyes Do Not See
(Às Vezes, os Teus Olhos Não Veem) explora o olhar maquínico que cada vez
mais permeia as práticas artísticas contemporâneas e reflete s obre o impacto
desse olhar na nossa perceção do mundo.
1
Palavras-chave: histograma de gradientes orientados, visão artificial, fotografia,
práticas artísticas

The history of machine vision is a photographic history. Since its early days, the
evolution of visually "intelligent" machines — machines able to see and make
sense of what they see — has been closely intertwined with photography. From
the first small datasets to recent databases consisting of millions of images,
photographic images have played a fundamental role in the development of
machine vision. By providing a vast and organised array of annotated images,
these databases, over the years, have significantly enhanced the reliability and
capabilities of machine vision systems, and such systems are currently used in
a wide array of applications, from autonomous vehicles to medical imaging to
plate recognition to identify vehicle plates (Treccani, 2018).
With the recent widespread appearance of "intelligent" machines, the bond
between machine vision and photography has deepened. The emergence of
visually "intelligent" machines has not only strengthened this relationship but
also resulted in contemporary photographic imagery significantly influenced
by the techniques developed in computer sciences. Such solutions and the
technological imagery they brought have, in fact, become part of the aesthetic
and investigations of many artists interested in exploring the potential and
dangers of visually "intelligent" machines and their role in shaping contemporary
ways of seeing. The intricate relationship between technological imagery and
artistic practices has resulted in a point where vision skills belong as much to
the realm of technology as to the realm of art (Smelik, 2010; Yiu, 2023). On
the one hand, computer scientists, since the 1960s, have looked into the domain
of art and image-making in trying to understand the machinery of vision and
to use such insights to build visually "intelligent" machines. On the other hand,
triggered and fascinated by the rapid advances in machine vision, artists have
started incorporating technical imagery from computer laboratories into their
works to explore a world increasingly cohabited by machines.
Sometimes Your Eyes Do Not See (see Figure 1, Figure 2, Figure 3, Figure
4, Figure 5, Figure 6 and Figure 7) is an attempt to investigate the visual
world of machines made of gradients, key points, bounding boxes and manually
segmented images, and the long-held conviction that fueled the development of
machine vision: it is possible to distil the complexity of the visual world into
data points. The project makes use of a feature descriptor technique, a technique
that simplifies an image by extracting useful information, called "histogram of
oriented gradients" (HOG) in the form of gradients — see the white "starry"
shape in the project's images (for a closer look, please see Figure 2 below) that
resemble the distribution of light on a given image. Conceived in the 1980s,
this technique gained prominence in the 1990s when researchers at the French
National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology started to
2
utilise this technique for pedestrian and vehicle detection in images. Within this
technique, an image is divided into small, connected regions called "cells", forming
a grid. Each cell is then analysed to generate a histogram of gradients within
the cell. The gradient at each point in the image indicates the direction and
strength of the most significant change in brightness, effectively capturing the
edges or outlines of objects in a given image. In other words, the gradient tries to
"describe" the appearance of objects in an image by highlighting where the most
noticeable changes in intensity occur. The key concept is that different objects
can be distinguished from one another by their distinctive gradient of patterns.
These unique patterns are then used to train an algorithm to differentiate objects
or classes of objects, for instance, to distinguish dogs from cats in a database of
animal images.
Figure 1: Sometimes Your Eyes Do Not See #1, 2023, analogue print, 40x30cm
(installation view)
3
(particular)
4
5
6
The HOG idea is, however, a photographic idea. The distribution of light, often
from a fixed above position — hence a certain regularity in its distribution — can
be utilised to simplify the complexity of the visual world. This interpretation,
typically hidden within algorithms, is brought to light in this project, offering a
glimpse into the unseen world of data. Sometimes Your Eyes Do Not See is an
attempt to reveal, reflect and comprehend the machinic gaze that increasingly
permeates our lives, from autonomous driving cars to smart surveillance cameras
and facial recognition technology for border control — and the many issues,
biases and discriminations associated with it. In this project, six images are
processed using Python, a programming language, to calculate their gradients.
The resulting black and white images offer a chance to see through the HOG
process in an attempt to make sense of such a process, leaving, however, the
viewer unable to create any sense of the image under their eyes and prompting a
series of questions on the nature of such images. What do they portray? What
do they mean? What purpose do they serve? Where do they belong, to the
technological domain or the art one? The sweeping reconfiguration of the visual
world initiated by photography in the 19th and 20th centuries is here continued
and expanded by the imaginaries produced by "intelligent" seeing machines that
reshape much of the culturally established understanding of what it means to
see (Crary, 1992). The new vision paradigm that emerges is that of a machinic
eye that escapes the anthropocentric eye and forces an investigation between
the familiar and comfortable human ways of seeing and the unfamiliar ways of
seeing of the visually "intelligent" machines and invites the viewer to rethink the
ways machines see the world (Paglen, 2014).
While HOG techniques have endowed machines with a measure of visual "in-
telligence", the contemporary obsession with data and its accompanying visual
narrative falls short in representing the richness of the visual world and exposing
tendencies, dynamics and opacities in how vision technologies operate. Despite
the mystery of what these images portray, Sometimes Your Eyes Do Not See
explores and tries to unveil the increasingly blurred boundaries between science,
technology, and art. It raises questions and encourages reflection on the continu-
ous and profound impact that technological imagination and imagery have on
artistic practices and culture in general and the mutual influence between art
and technology.
Biographical Note
Carloalberto Treccani is an artist and research assistant professor in the De-
partment of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University.
His work explores the development and implications of visually "intelligent"
machines.
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8815-3498
Email: ctreccani@hkbu.edu.hk
7
Address: Carloalberto Treccani, Department of Humanities and Creative Writing,
Hong Kong Baptist University, Sir Run Run Shaw Building, Hong Kong Baptist
University, 224 Waterloo Road, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong SAR, China
References
Crary, J. (1992). Techniques of the observer: On vision and modernity in the
19th century. The MIT Press.
Paglen, T. (2014). Is photography over? Fotomuseum Winterthur. https:
//www.fotomuseum.ch/en/series/is-photography-over/
Smelik, A. (2021). The scientific imaginary in visual culture. V&R unipress.
Treccani, C. (2018). How machines see the world: Understanding image annota-
tion. European Journal of Media Studies, 7(1), 235–254. https://doi.org/10.259
69/mediarep/3425
Yiu, S. (2023). The convergence of art and science: SheungYiu's insights into
image studies. Falling Walls.
______________________________________________
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License.

Sometimes_Your_Eyes_Do_Not_See

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Sometimes_Your_Eyes_Do_Not_See

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Sometimes_Your_Eyes_Do_Not_See

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Sometimes Your Eyes Do Not See

Às Vezes, os Teus Olhos Não Veem

Sometimes Your Eyes Do Not See

You might also like