Parallels

“Parallels” is a site-specific, responsive machine-learning installation, which transforms a large LED wall into a portal for visitors to meet the world and themselves through the lens of a neural network. The work enables a visceral and unmediated experience of the way in which machine vision discerns the environment through live digital decoding of a changing landscape, dreaming and reframing it in a constant conversation with those who encounter it.

The project seeks to recontextualize emerging machine vision technologies within a natural landscape that has been inhabited for over 20,000 years, questioning how new forms of artificial knowledge can be placed within a longue durée of human sensemaking practices. The installation thus draws the sphere of machine vision into conversation with the natural world and the historical embeddedness of the viewer, providing an occasion to meditate on a moment when ways of seeing are being reconfigured.

The work has been developed in the framework of ONX Studio, Onassis Foundation’s accelerator, and is commissioned by Onassis Stegi for the “Plásmata II: Ioannina” exhibition.