“Window Water ${object} Moving (Convolutional Mnemonics)” presented by Ribeiro
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Mixed (full papers)
Presentation Title:
- Window Water ${object} Moving (Convolutional Mnemonics)
Presentation Subtheme:
- Shifting temporalities
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
The paper presents and discusses aspects of the installation “Window Water ${object} Moving (convolutional mnemonics)” (2023-2024) experimenting with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with ml5.js for object classification to critically address ectogenesis concerning chronopolitics and related temporal aesthetics in the evolution of government views, policies, and program measures, concerning population size and growth. The works address the necropolitical use of humans’ bodies, which can foster economic growth in ways that directly and dramatically impact our tentative friendly permanence on Planet Earth. As if an appropriated and deconstructed hookah could be ‘a metaphorical ectogenous chamber’ — the relational object (plastic bag resembling a biobag for ectogenesis, atomizer, USB camera/P5JS ml5 for object classification, two hookah flexible hoses tubing and handle)—invites the audience to interfere in the mist pattern by ‘blowing through the hoses’ and consequently influencing the guessing of objects by the machine learning library. The ml5 library is so, guessing ‘objects’ from fluid mist patterns as we guess shapes by observing the clouds. The work explores a possible generative convolutional aesthetics of objects-as-babies-as-objects — as if the only possible babies-outcomes that our accelerated hyper-mediated algorithmic society wants to produce are objects—namable shapes that can be identified by convolutional neural networks’ based libraries. The aesthetics of the trans object and its functioning— blowing through tubes and interfering in the mist fluid and mutable patterns—invites us to navigate animistic references to tubes—flutes, shamanic pipes, humans’ respiratory and reproductive organs, and the generative power attributed to them in the Amazonian Tucano people’s cosmology, from the perspective brought by the anthropologist Stephen Hugh-Jones in his “Thinking through Tubes: Flowing H/air and Synaesthesia.”
