The Perception Machine:Our Photographic Future between the Eye and AI

by: Joanna Zylinska (Author)

Publisher: MIT Press

Publication Date: 7 Nov. 2023

Language: English

Print Length: 288 pages

ISBN-10: 0262546833

ISBN-13: 9780262546836

Book Description

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 leaing databases with our data, which in tu 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.