Art as Data Set, Data Set as Art: Training machine vision systems to see as artists.

The process of an artist ’speaking’ to an audience by illustrating meaning underlying a body of work on a subject is commonplace within contemporary art. In the age of mechanical reproduction artists can quickly and simply assemble and collate coherent sets of visual materials as a means of non-verbal investigation. In the world of technical images (Flusser 2011) the meaning in a photograph or technically produced image is buried beneath the surface. Artists often assemble bodies of work, as collections of related materials or multiples, sometimes in the style of the visual essay. This allows the artist to illustrate, through type and repetition and focus and observation, that which is important in the pattern of things to an audience. This process assists the audience to see ‘what relates to what’ between items in the body of work in a non-verbal visual, semantic or cognitive way. This collation and relation of pattern, or similarity, of defining an unspoken meaning with exemplar work is also the foundation of how computer vision systems classify and ‘understand’ the world. This classification comes from human ’trainers’ assembling materials as data sets and ascribing meaning to the data sets in an ontological way. In this paper I describe the process of creating a data set for machine learning from a photographic collection. The photographic materials collected as part of a larger artwork. In the text I explain how this dataset is an extension of the artwork and also an artwork in it’s own right. As datasets used for training machine vision systems are commonly centrally generated for commercial/industrial processes I argue that the idea of an artist generated artwork /dataset is the beginning of a process of taking control of the means of surveillance, teaching machine vision systems to see not just how the surveillance capital commercial hegemony sees but how artists see. This creation of artist’s data sets and data sets as art is in itself an intervention as art work. We are proposing an evolution of the arguments originating in the industrial revolution of seizing control of the means of production. Now in the age of the surveillance society and surveillance capitalism artists are proposing ‘Seizing control of the means of surveillance’.