The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future between the Eye and AI
Joanna Zylinska
MIT Press
English
Softcover
268 pages
157 x 232 mm
2023
ISBN 9780262376631
A provocative investigation of the future of photography and human perception in the age of AI.
We are constantly photographing and being photographed while feeding machine learning databases with our data, which in turn is used to generate new images. Analyzing the transformation of photography by computation—and the transformation of human perception by algorithmically driven images, from CGI to AI—The Perception Machine investigates what it means for us to live surrounded by image flows and machine eyes. In an astute and engaging argument, Joanna Zylinska brings together media theory and neuroscience in a Vilém Flusser–Paul Virilio remix. Her “perception machine” names a technical universe of images and their infrastructures. But it also refers to a sociopolitical condition resulting from today’s automation of vision, imaging—and imagination.
Written by a theorist-practitioner, the book incorporates Zylinska’s own art projects, some of which have been co-created with AI. The photographs, collages, films, and installations available as part of the book (and its companion website) provide a different mode of thinking about our technological futures, at a local as well as a planetary level. Offering provocative concepts such as eco-eco-punk, AUTO-FOTO-KINO, planetary micro-vision, loser images, and sensography, the book outlines an existential philosophy of messy media for a time when our practices of imaging and self-imaging are being radically redesigned. Importantly, it also offers a new vision of our future.
(Source: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5687/The-Perception-MachineOur-Photographic-Future)
About the Author
Joanna Zylinska is a writer, lecturer, artist and curator, working in the areas of digital technologies and new media, ethics, photography and art. She is Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. She is also a member of Creative AI Lab, a collaboration between King’s and Serpentine Galleries. Prior to joining King’s in 2021, she worked for many years at Goldsmiths, University of London, including as Co-Head of its Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies. She has held visiting positions as Guest Professor at Shandong University in China, Winton Chair Visiting Scholar at the University of Minnesota, US, and Beaverbrook Visiting Scholar at McGill University in Canada.
http://www.joannazylinska.net/
(Source: http://www.joannazylinska.net/)
About the Publisher
Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design. MIT Press books and journals are known for their intellectual daring, scholarly standards, interdisciplinary focus, and distinctive design.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/
(Source: https://mitpress.mit.edu/about/)
