Learning to See – Memo Akten

Learning to See: You are what you see is Memo Akten's ongoing series working with Machine Learning algorithms. In this project, he reflects on the data sets that are fed into these algorithms and how they make use question the way our personal realities are constructed. He says, "The picture we see in our conscious minds is not a direct representation of the outside world, or of what our senses deliver, but is of a simulated world, reconstructed based on our expectations and prior beliefs." Watching the results of these machines "learning to see", you start to wonder how the results would differ by swapping the dataset, as Akten does with The Google Art Dataset, images from the Hubble Space Telescope, and search images from Donald Trump, Theresa May, among other politicians. In a way, we get a glimpse into how the world could be perceived if visual history took a different path.