What It Is
- immersive media installation visualizing relations among 1.7 mil documents in SALT Research Collections
- SALT Research Collections: both physical and digital, focus on art history of the 19th century to present in Turkish and Southeast Mediterranean, as well as Southeast Europe.
- SALT: contemporary art institution in Istanbul.
- media: machine learning, artificial intelligence, data, canvas, projection.
- documents are fed as images into an image-recognition network, which then recognized the features for each document.
- documents arranged into 1024 dimensional-space.
- the dimensions are reduced to a 2D or 3D projection, with visually-similar objects still neighboring each other.
- when the installation is "asleep", it "hallucinates" of previously non-existing documents generated by AI.
Behance:
https://www.behance.net/gallery/5322589 ... e-Dreaming
Video:
https://vimeo.com/218573298
(Short) Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNXeTl91PsE
Why I Chose It
- the environment is a robot in the sense that its algorithm automates a task without human interference.
- moreover, it is related to the idea of sublime.
- this algorithm accomplishes / attempts a task which a human cannot. immersed by the projection and its vast amount of data, the human is in awe.
- while the 19th century person feels awed in front of natural landscape. the 21st century person feels the same emotion of
sublime when observing technology.
- OED definition of "SUBLIME":
affecting the mind with a sense of overwhelming grandeur or irresistible power; calculated to inspire awe, deep reverence, or lofty emotion, by reason of its beauty, vastness, or grandeur.
- SUBLIME - Edmund Burke’s
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757):
terms as darkness, obscurity, privation, vastness, magnificence, loudness and suddenness, and that our reaction is defined by a kind of pleasurable terror.
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/images/research/1226_10.jpg
- TECHNOLOGICAL SUBLIME - Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe's
Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (1999):
the sublime cannot exist in nature today...the sublime can only inhabit, or be expressed by, technology – as technology is limitless and yet to be apprehended...nature is limited and finite, and that the sublime requires the limitlessness of technology.
- i.e. one feels terror and vastness of 9.11. while watching live coverage of the event on television.
- AMERICAN TECHNOLOGICAL SUBLIME - David Nye,
American Technological Sublime (1994):
...admiration of the natural sublime, as it might be experienced in the Grand Canyon, was replaced by the sublime of the factory, the sublime of aviation, the sublime of auto-mobility, the sublime of war machinery, and the sublime of the computer.
Reference
http://saltonline.org/media/files/refik ... galata.pdf
http://saltresearch.org/primo_library/l ... _en_US.jsp.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/5322589 ... e-Dreaming
https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/media ... ulsublime/
https://vimeo.com/218573298
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-br ... nd-sublime
https://www.nextnature.net/2011/07/the- ... l-sublime/