PARALLELS

A site-specific installation exploring how computer vision interprets the landscape.

Marc Da Costa & Matthew Niederhauser (2023)

LED wall, camera, environmental sensors, and machine learning model. Continuous duration.

“An imagined landscape, then, is a landscape not of being but of becoming: a composition not of objects and surfaces but of movements and stillness, not there to be surveyed but cast in the current of time.” ― Tim Ingold, Imagining Landscapes: Past, Present and Future

Parallels is a site-specific, responsive machine learning installation that transforms an LED wall into a portal for visitors to encounter the world and themselves through the lens of a neural network. The work enables a visceral and unmediated encounter with how machine vision discerns the environment through a live digital decoding of a changing landscape, dreaming and reframing it in conversation with those who encounter it.

The project seeks to recontextualize emerging machine vision technologies within a natural landscape that has been inhabited for over 20,000 years, questioning how new forms of artificial knowledge can be placed within a longue durée of human sensemaking practices. The installation thus draws the sphere of machine vision into conversation with the natural world and the historical embeddedness of the viewer, providing an occasion to meditate on a moment when ways of seeing are being reconfigured.

This project was created with the support of the Onassis Foundation USA and ONX Studio.