A Cat, A Dog, A Microwave...Cultural Practices and Politics of Image Datasets

Departing from the research by The Photographers' Gallery digital programme, this book critically investigates the development and impact of visual datasets from the perspective of machine learning, while exploring their artistic possibilities in the contemporary image culture. Visual datasets are large collections of images typically created by researchers to develop machine vision algorithms. These curated sets of digital photographs and videos have become an object of interest and concern also for artists, thinkers, and cultural institutions. A Cat, A Dog, A Microwave_ brings together a broad range of associative perspectives from artists, computers scientists, curators and researchers to question the role played by photography when teaching machines how to see the world. The book maps a network of ideas and experiences on labour, identity, aesthetics, circulation, and control and their complex relationship with photographic notions of taxonomy and classification. Historical surveys, and specific case studies are brought together with experimental artistic practices to propose an imaginative perspective on photographic datasets. Edited by Nicolas Maleve & Ioanna Zouli. Contributors; Katrina Sluis, Geoff Cox, Jon Uriarte, Genevieve Fried, Deborah Raji, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Florian A. Schmidt, Sebastian Schmieg, xtine burrough, Sabrina Starnaman, Everest Pipkin, Alan Blackwell & Gaia Tedone.